I'm only half kidding. I don't hate the Toronto Raptors, even as I've been rooting like crazy for this Oakland basketball team for years now, ever since we saw them play in Portland in 2014, before they ever won any championships.
I went with this silly topic because that Toronto Raptor logo from their inaugural year, 1995, was clearly based on our favorite baddies from the 1993 film Jurassic Park, as classic now as it was 26 years ago.
My son loves it. He just turned three, and maybe I shouldn't have let him watch it?
Even in the reboot/sequel Jurassic World, the raptors haven't changed:
I mean, the graphics improved, and maybe they don't use puppets like they did for the closeups in '93, but essentially they're the same.
And they're totally wrong.
As in, those aren't velociraptors.
You may have heard this story by now: Michael Crichton liked the name "velociraptor" more than "deinonychus," which is what he based the actual character on. (DI-non-i-kus, if you're curious.)
I was looking through one of Cass's dinosaur books and saw what I was sure was the raptor, but it was labeled deinonychus. (That kinda lead to this dive, actually.)
Now, knowing that the name is wrong is only half the story, as in now we know, from analysis of the skeletons, that all of these dinosaurs were feathered.
Check out the re-imagining of our good pal deinonychus:
Wait...
So, okay, I get the new feathered look supplanting the outdated dinosaur-y look (is it nostalgia to prefer the dinosaur-y look?), but the size scale seems off. Is this size scaled correctly, because that doesn't seem like the movie character dinosaur?
I'm not the only person think that, apparently, since as I dove down the hole on this topic, there raged an argument online over whether or not Crichton used deinonychus or some other dromaesauridae example, that being the overarching family of theropods raptors belonged to.
It sounds like the consensus has shifted away from deinonychus---it was too small for the character from the book and not from Mongolia---and onto the achillobator: it was properly sized and seems to have been found, like velociraptor itself, in Mongolia.
Check it:
Here's an artist's rendition with feathers and with the older school face, sort of melding the two designs:
Could an animal's face actually look like that if the rest of them was radically different than originally imagined?
Here's a different artist's rendition, with a more updated look for the face:
What about the cool-named velociraptor itself? It was closer in size and girth to a turkey:
A gang of them could probably have taken down a person, but I'd take my chances with one of those old-school hard-metal rakes.
Check out the little cutey:
Their feathers may have been even more colorful...
The quill knobs, features on bones that anchored feathers, are the reason paleontologists today know so much about the feathers of any dinosaur that's considered feathered. The actual raptors, like these velociraptors, had strong enough quill knobs on their bones that they could have easily been used to glide across treetops.
Speaking truth to childhood imaginations:
I found this image and I think it's very cool. I wanted to share it, but it's not my creation. It also has some incorrect scaling, like it wasn't in on the deinonychus/achillobator sizing discussions, but so what, it's beautiful:
It collects the main bulk of the different types of raptors, gives them more accurate looks, and does a rather good job scaling them, previously stated differences of opinion notwithstanding.
To bring this discussion back to the NBA, the sole Canadian team, and reigning champs, also have a really cool, updated, logo:
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