Raptors: The Bird-Like Dinosaurs

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Did you know that some dinosaurs had wings and feather but they didn’t have any use for flight? According to “Raptors: The Bird-like Dinosaurs of Mesozoic Era” by Bob Strauss, Over 70 million years ago, there was a family of feathered dinosaurs called Raptors. Raptors were feathered Theropods that varied in size from no bigger than a large chicken, to exceeding the height of a full grown man. The time the Raptors lived mainly centered around 65-90 million years ago in the Cretaceous era. A Raptors diet mainly depended on its size. If the raptor is small it goes after small prey or insects unless they have a big enough group to take on larger prey. In some cases like Velociraptor, if there wasn’t enough food around and the group was hungry, they would fight over food and possibly eat one of their own. With larger Raptors this was not an issue because they were big, fast, and agile enough to take down larger prey than the smaller Raptors and in result there was enough food for the whole …show more content…
The one Raptor that could glide the best were the Raptors with 4 wings. Like the Microraptor, Atrociraptor has 2 full wings on its arms and 2 half wings on its back legs. The feathers were useless when it came to flight, but were essential for the smaller Raptors to glide from tree to tree in order to hunt or escape predators. The smallest Raptor was around a foot long and about a pound heavy! The largest Raptor to date is the Utahraptor at around 25 feet long and around 1,000-2,000 pounds which was recorded as the biggest Raptor in the world found as of 2018. One of the most memorable Raptors was the Velociraptor. In the Jurassic Park movies Velociraptor is portrayed to be this man-sized, scaly lizard like, brilliant dinosaur when in reality Velociraptor was no bigger than a large chicken, had feathers, and was not as smart as it was portrayed to

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