Field Notes
Utahraptor
Say it: YOO-tah-rap-tor
It means the robber from Utah. Early Cretaceous, about 135 million years ago. Around eighteen feet long and about as heavy as a small horse. Nine is a big one, and eighteen feet is a real size.
It is the biggest raptor anybody has found, and it was found by its foot
In 1991 a scientist in Utah got a claw out of a hillside that measured nine and a half inches round the curve — longer than your whole hand. Everything anybody knew about raptors said no raptor came that big. This one did. And it lived about sixty million years before the turkey-sized Velociraptor everybody has heard of, which means the famous small one is the late one and the enormous one came first.
There is a nine-ton block of rock in a workshop with a whole group of them inside it
In a quarry in Utah somebody found a lump of old sandstone with several Utahraptors packed into it at once — babies, half-grown ones and adults together — in what used to be quicksand. Nobody has found anything else like it. Whether they walked in together, or one at a time over weeks, each one stuck trying to eat the one that got stuck before it, is exactly the argument the people digging it out are still having. It is being chipped out a spoonful at a time. It has taken years, it is not finished, and the people doing it will tell you that is fine.
How we know
A paleontologist called Jim Kirkland named the animal in 1993, off the claw, a shin bone and a few other pieces. The block came out of a place called the Stikes Quarry, and the chipping is still going on.
What we made up. The collar, and the idea that any dinosaur ever obeyed a whistle. And her feathers. Nobody has ever found a Utahraptor feather — we put them on her off her cousins, some of them no bigger than a crow, which had them for certain. The size, the way she holds a thing down with her foot instead of slashing at it, and the fact that she never roars are real. Nothing in the fossil record has ever roared.
This page is printed at the back of The Collar and the Key, one of ten. Copy it, print it, read it out in a classroom — that is what it is for.