The Anthropocene Reviewed(15)

For starters, velociraptors did not live in what is now Montana; they lived in what is now Mongolia and China, hence the scientific name, Velociraptor mongoliensis. While they were smart for dinosaurs, they were not smarter than dolphins or primates; they were probably closer to chickens or possums. And they were not six feet tall; they were about the size of a contemporary turkey, but with a long tail that could stretch for over three feet. They are estimated to have weighed less than thirty-five pounds, so it’s difficult to imagine one killing a human. In fact, they were probably mostly scavengers, eating meat from already dead carcasses.

Furthermore, velociraptors were not scaly but feathered. We know this because researchers found quill knobs on a velociraptor’s forearm in 2007. But even in Crichton’s day, most paleontologists thought velociraptors and other members of the Dromaeosauridae family were feathered. Although velociraptors are not believed to have flown, their ancestors probably did. Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History put it this way: “The more we learn about these animals, the more we find out that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today, our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.” Indeed, as a guide recently pointed out to me at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, pictures of birds without feathers look a lot like pictures of dinosaurs.

Velociraptors probably did sometimes hunt. A famous fossil discovered in 1971 in Mongolia preserved a velociraptor locked in battle with a pig-sized dinosaur called protoceratops. The velociraptor appears to have had one of its sickle-shaped claws embedded in the neck of the protoceratops, which was biting down on the velociraptor’s arm when they were both suddenly buried in sand, perhaps due to a collapsing sand dune. But we don’t know how often velociraptors hunted, or how successfully, or whether they hunted in packs.

Crichton based his velociraptors on a different dinosaur, the deinonychus, which did live in present-day Montana and was the approximate size and shape of Jurassic Park’s velociraptors. Crichton took the name “velociraptor” because he thought it was “more dramatic,” which presumably is also why the theme park is called Jurassic Park even though most of the dinosaurs in the park did not live in the Jurassic age, which ended one hundred and forty-five million years ago, but instead in the Cretaceous age, which ended sixty-six million years ago with the extinction event that resulted in the disappearance of around three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, including all large species of what we now consider dinosaurs.

And so our image of velociraptors says more about us than it does about them. Really, even what we do know, or think we know, about dinosaurs is endlessly shaped by assumptions and presuppositions, some of which will eventually prove incorrect. In ancient China, dinosaur fossils were believed to be dragon bones. In 1676, the first dinosaur bone to be described by European scientists, a piece of thigh bone from a Megalosaurus, was thought to have come from the kind of giants depicted in the Bible.*

Megalosaurus was first described in a scientific journal in 1824, around the time the paleontologist Mary Ann Mantell discovered the first known fossils of an iguanodon. The Tyrannosaurus rex wasn’t named until 1905. The first velociraptor fossil was discovered in 1924.

Scientists have been debating for more than a century whether the long-necked brontosaurus of the Jurassic age even existed or is just a misidentified apatosaurus. The brontosaurus was real in the late nineteenth century, only to become a fiction for much of the twentieth, only to become real again in the last few years. History is new. Prehistory is newer. And paleontology is newer still.

But the weird thing to me about velociraptors is that even though I know they were feathered scavengers about the size of a swan, when I imagine them, I can’t help but see the raptors of Jurassic Park. Knowing the facts doesn’t help me picture the truth. That’s the wonder and terror of computer-generated images for me: If they look real, my brain isn’t nearly sophisticated enough to understand they are not. We’ve long known that images are unreliable—Kafka wrote that “nothing is as deceptive as a photograph”—and yet I still can’t help but believe them.

Like the velociraptor, I have a large brain for my geologic age, but maybe not large enough to survive effectively in the world where I find myself. My eyes still believe what they see, long after visual information stops being reliable. Still, I’m fond of raptors—both the ones I’ve seen that never existed, and the ones that existed but I’ve never seen.

I give velociraptors three stars.





CANADA GEESE



THE CANADA GOOSE is a brown-bodied, black-necked, honking waterfowl that has recently become ubiquitous in suburban North America, Europe, and New Zealand. With a song like a dying balloon and a penchant for attacking humans, the Canada goose is hard to love. But then again, so are most of us.*

These days, the world contains between four and six million Canada geese, although from where I’m sitting in Indianapolis, that estimate feels low, as there appear to be four to six million of them currently residing in my backyard. Regardless, global Canada goose populations are growing, but they were once exceptionally rare. In fact, the subspecies you’re most likely to see in parks and retention ponds, the giant Canada goose, was believed to be extinct early in the twentieth century due to year-round, unrestricted hunting.