Trivia / Raptor Red

• Accidentally Correct Zoology: Quite a few of Bakker's speculative ideas wound up being validated by future finds.
  • Bakker included a therizinosaur ("segnosaur") in the story even though none were known from the right time and place when the book was written. (Perhaps not coincidentally, it was depicted as a mountain dweller, therefore living in an environment unlikely to preserve its fossils.) A decade later, a therizinosaur (Falcarius) roughly contemporaneous with Utahraptor was published.
  • With the 2010 description of Geminiraptor, Bakker was likewise right about small troodontids having coexisted with Utahraptor.
  • Raptor Red and her family are shown hunting a large-bodied ostrich dinosaur. In 2018, we discovered a large ornithomimosaur from the Early Cretaceous of North America, Arkansaurus. Though it lived after Utahraptor, it did coexist with Deinonychus and Acrocanthosaurus (who are likewise prominent in the book).
  • Obscure pterosaur Ornithodesmus (now known as Istiodactylus) is depicted as a scavenger, while at the time, it was thought of as a fish eater. In 2012, Mark Witton did some research and confirmed that Istiodactylus was indeed a scavenger.
  • When Raptor Red and her family briefly live in the mountains, one of the local animals is said to be a small iguanodont that is easily killed by the raptors. In 2010, we described a small iguanodont called Hippodraco, which coexisted with Utahraptor.
  • When the book was written in 1995, no Early Cretaceous diplodocids were known. Then, in 2014, Leinkupal laticauda was found in Argentina. Granted, it lived in a different continent from Utahraptor, but it still lived at exactly the same time.
• Science Marches On: In short, this novel was cutting-edge science fiction in 1995, but paleontology is an incredibly fast-moving science.
  • The book came out just before dromaeosaurids like Raptor Red and her kin were confirmed to have feathers. The same turned out to be true for troodonts and ostrich dinos. To be fair, it's just about the only birdlike trait the Utahraptors in this book don't have.
  • The book repeatedly stresses that Utahraptor originated in Asia and migrated into North America via the Bering land bridge, and at the end mentions that the descendants of the American Utahraptor eventually traveled back into Asia, citing the then-recent discovery of another large dromaeosaur from Asia, likely referring to the animal that would be named Achillobator in 1999. While Utahraptor and Achillobator are quite similar and some studies recover them as fairly close relatives, the latter turned out to be tens of millions of years younger than Utahraptor and there is no evidence to suggest that Utahraptor originated in Asia. While it isn’t impossible that its ancestors came from the east, it could just as well have been born and bred in America.
  • The taxon Ornithodesmus shows up in the book as a pterosaur. Turns out that it was actually a misidentified dromaeosaurid, the first named. The pterosaur material with the fossil has been named Istiodactylus. Bakker was right about Istiodactylus being scavengers though.
  • Therizinosaurs are depicted as featherless burrowers, and are referred to as "segnosaurs." They're now considered to have been feathered, although digging may be plausible. In addition, several of the illustrations depict them as quadrupeds (or at least crouching), but it is now known that therizinosaurs were bipedal, like other theropods^note Indeed, it used to be uncertain that therizinosaurs were theropods at all..
  • Iguanodon is an exclusively European genus. At the time, it was thought to have also lived in North America, with Iguanodon lakotaensis being known from a partial skull from the Lakota Formation and Iguanodon ottingeri, known only from teeth and jaw fragments, being found alongside Utahraptor at the Yellow Cat Member of the Cedar Mountain Formation. However, the latter is now considered a nomen dubium, and the former was reclassified as Dakotadon lakotaensis in 2008. The giant dromaeosaur did coexist with the very similar Iguanacolossus though.
  • Acrocanthosaurus, while still an apex predator, is depicted as mid-sized, at just 3 tons. At the time the novel was written, only the holotype and paratype were properly described, neither of which are particularly large, but almost immediately after, workers described more and larger skeletons (such as "Fran"), which showed that Acrocanthosaurus reached much greater sizes, up to 38 feet and 6 tons, just marginally smaller than T. rex. Subsequent phylogenetic analyses also showed that carcharodontosaurs like Acrocanthosaurus were actually derived allosaurs, but the novel treats Acrocanthosaurus and the Jurassic allosaurs such as Allosaurus as entirely different types of theropods.
  • Kronosaurus is described as 40 feet long, but that was based on an incorrect reconstruction that gave it too many vertebrae. It would have had a more compact body, at 30-35 feet. It's also given a weight of 20 tons, but later estimates put it at half that weight.
  • The depiction of the dromaeosaurs' hunting techniques is now considered outdated with respect to how the hind claws were used. Based in large part on observation of how modern raptorial birds like hawks and eagles use their talons (which can be thought of as having "raptor claws" on all of their toes since they no longer need to use them for running), it's now thought the the giant curved claws on species such as Utahraptor were used for gripping prey, not slicing or tearing. You can look up "raptor prey restraint" theory if you want more of the gory details.
  • The story notably fudges the coexisting fauna, most obviously that Utahraptor (late Valanginian-Hauterivian) is known from significantly older deposits than Deinonychus and Acrocanthosaurus (late Aptian-early Ablbian). This was more plausible at the time, when Utahraptor and sympatric genera from the Yellow Cat Member were thought to have lived during the late Barremian-early Aptian, leaving only a gap of circa 5-7 million years, but now it's much harder to Hand Wave the anachronism. That said, Yellow Cat did house the smaller dromaeosaur Yurgovuchia and isolated teeth point towards the presence of a large allosaur of some kind.