The size of a turkey
The film version is twice the height of the real animal, which stood about half a metre tall at the hip.
The great hunters · Theropods
Velociraptor
Swift thief · veh-LOSS-ih-RAP-tor
A turkey-sized, feathered hunter with a long, narrow snout, a stiff tail and a curved claw on each foot.
- Size
- About 2m long; 15kg
- Lived
- About 75 to 71 million years ago
- Found in
- Mongolia and northern China
Darts after you, tail out straight. Move your pointer and see.
To scale
How big was it?
The bars are drawn to the same scale. On these pages the animals are sized in proportion to each other as far as a screen allows: the giants are shrunk a little and the smallest are enlarged, so that you can see them all.
Good to know
Six things about the velociraptor
It had feathers
Its arm bones have the small bumps where large feathers were attached, as birds' do.
A sickle claw
The second toe on each foot carried a large curved claw, held up off the ground.
Caught fighting
One famous fossil shows a Velociraptor locked in combat with a Protoceratops. They died together, perhaps buried by a collapsing dune.
A desert animal
It lived among sand dunes, not jungle.
A stiff tail
Bony rods kept its tail rigid, for balance in fast turns.
The real thing
Photos of the velociraptor
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
What it ate
Small dinosaurs, lizards and mammals.
How we know
It was first found in the Gobi Desert in 1923. The quill bumps on its arm were spotted in 2007.
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