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| Deinonychus antirrhopus |
Your second thought, if you were a small animal, would probably be, “Oh dear.”
Deinonychus antirrhopus was a two-legged, meat-eating dinosaur that lived in what is now North America roughly 115 to 108 million years ago.
Its name means “terrible claw”, which is charmingly direct for palaeontology. There is no need to work through three layers of Latin to discover that this animal had a rather alarming feature attached to each foot.
On the second toe of each hind foot sat a large, curved claw. Deinonychus could hold that toe off the ground as it moved, keeping the claw ready for action.
It also had sharp teeth and a long, stiffened tail that helped it balance. Imagine a feathered predator built for agility, with excellent equipment and absolutely no interest in your personal space.
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| Deinonychus skull |
When he described the animal in 1969, its light build and active-looking anatomy challenged the popular image of dinosaurs as slow, lumbering creatures.
Deinonychus helped set off the “dinosaur renaissance”: a fresh look at how dinosaurs moved, behaved and, eventually, how closely some were related to birds.
That makes it a scientific celebrity, even if Hollywood gave most of its screen time to someone else.
The famous “Velociraptors” of Jurassic Park drew heavily on Deinonychus. Actual Velociraptor was smaller. Deinonychus, meanwhile, has spent decades watching another dinosaur accept the applause.
Fossils of Deinonychus have been found alongside the plant-eating dinosaur Tenontosaurus. Researchers have also identified marks on Tenontosaurus bones that they interpret as Deinonychus bites. It seems clear that Tenontosaurus could end up as food.
Whether Deinonychus hunted it alone, hunted in groups, scavenged it, or did some combination of these remains harder to pin down.
That is the joy and occasional frustration of palaeontology: a fossil can tell us who came to dinner without providing the seating chart.
We also do not have direct fossil feathers from Deinonychus itself. Its close relatives and its place on the dinosaur family tree make a feathered appearance a strong scientific interpretation, though. The scaly movie raptor may have had good lighting, but a fluffy Deinonychus is much closer to how many picture the real animal.
So give Deinonychus its due. It was a formidable Cretaceous predator, a surprise star of dinosaur science and quite possibly the owner of the most consequential toenail in palaeontology. Cute, deadly and a lovely fossil to behold!
