Clever Girl

By: Matthew
Nellessen

My topic and research question is discussing why

people either dont accept or dont know that
many therapods (two-legged dinosaurs), including
Velociraptor, had feathers.
Say
What?!?

My hypothesis is that the large

majority of people arent aware of
dinosaurs like Velociraptor having
feathers do to the fact that movies
like Jurassic Park have for a long
time misrepresented them as being
more reptilian, as compared to birdlike, and many dinosaur-related
books and museums have been slow
in updating or revising their pictures

I focused my research on trying to figure out what

influenced people to picture or imagine dinosaurs the way
that they do. I speculated most peoples ideas of what
dinosaurs looked like comes from the Jurassic Park movies
or other Hollywood films involving dinosaurs. Hollywood can
have pretty major influences on people. For example, the
80s cop movie Dirty Harry made the .44 magnum the most
popular handgun in America, and how many yellow
Camaros have you seen on the road since the Transformers
movies have come out. Films can gave a big influence on
whats popular or considered true.

Methodology
So I went around to various college students, ages 18-28, and I
asked them to draw a picture of a Velociraptor and then after
seeing their drawing, I would ask them why they drew it without
feathers and what basically influenced them to draw it that way. If
someone did draw feathers on it, I would ask them why they did
draw feathers on it. It was a fairly simple survey but it got the
point.

What I got from the results from my survey didnt quite

reflect the results I expected, but it wasnt necessarily far
off. Of the 15 people I had take this survey, only 3 people
actually listed the Jurassic Park as the reasoning to why they
didnt put feathers on their drawing. So far fewer people
listed these movies as their reasoning than I thought would.
Aww nuts

What I ended up finding was that most of the people, 8 of 15,

stated that they were not aware of any dinosaurs having
feathers at all. Some just said they hadnt known this, others
said in pictures in books or at museums, there arent any
dinosaurs depicted with feathers. This represents how books
and museums have been slow in keeping up with
paleontological changes. Some of it is partly due to ignorance
and lack of knowledge of the new findings proving certain
dinosaurs had feathers. Other reasons include the money
involved in having to redo the depictions to be accurate.

There were two people who did not know what a

Velociraptor was and since I could not tell them what it
looked like since that would skew my data, their survey
ended at that. I did actually have two people who
acknowledged its feathers. One person drew the
dinosaur with feathers while although the other didnt,
when asked why they didnt include feathers, they said
that that hypothesis wasnt widely accepted, which
demonstrates that they had at least heard of the
possibility of feathered dinosaurs.

So from my research, I determined that the

movies did have some effect on some people in
how they determined a dinosaur to appear. But
a large majority of people got their
interpretations from old and outdated info that
has been too slow to keep up.
Yo! Keep up
back there!

Certain dinosaurs were first theorized

to potentially have feathers back in
the 80s so when the Jurassic Park
novels by Michael Crichton and the
first two movies were released, they
feather theory was still just that, a
theory. This gives an excuse for the
books and the two movies for not
having feathered Velociraptors.
However hard proof was found of
feathered raptors in 1999, which
explains Jurassic Park IIIs attempt at
adding feathers, though the newest
Jurassic World returned to the original
scaled version. So feathered
dinosaurs have been fact for 16 years

So the movies acknowledged that Velociraptor had

feathers and made a weak attempt at adding them.
However the poorer reviews of the third movie, some
concerning the added feathers, caused the studios to
bring out their original raptors. Even one of my books
about dinosaurs, which came out in 2006, just said they
might have had feathers in an attempt to be correct,
but not wanting to throw this drastic change at people
in fear of negative review.

Another note I come across with people is that they do

not like the idea of a feathered dinosaur, especially
something iconic like Velociraptor. Its like people
dislike the idea of a dinosaur being feathered as being
less scary and it therefore shouldnt be true.

For some reason a lot of people seem to

think that if you add feathers to dinosaurs
youll be doing this to them.

When in reality they would have looked

something more like this

Velociraptors, among other feathered

dinosaurs, especially raptors, would have
used their feathers for many reasons such
as display, warmth, and even in hunting to
make them more aerodynamically close to
the ground and flapping their feathers
could assist them in staying anchored on
running prey. Some smaller raptors and
juvenile raptors even had moderate
flying/gliding capabilities.

So whether people like it or not, many two-legged,

carnivorous dinosaurs did indeed have feathers.
And although from my collected empirical research,
Hollywood didnt play as major a role in why many
people are unaware of this knowledge, I still believe
it plays an important one. Books, museums, and
anything else teaching about dinosaurs needs to
catch up in accurately depicting these dinosaurs for
how they really were.