This New Raptor Species Confirms that Scaly Naked Movie Raptors Are Dumb

Hold onto your butts, because paleontologists just announced the biggest winged dinosaur ever discovered, a close relative to the Velociraptors made famous by the Jurassic Park franchise. Named Zhenyuanlong suni, the animal represents a new species and genus of raptor, or "dromaeosaurid," as this group of dinosaurs is known in paleontological parlance.

Moreover, the dinosaur's remains are preserved in immaculate detail, revealing its five-foot-long frame and sickle-shaped toe claws. Even the animal's dense feathered plumage survived the fossilization process largely unscathed—a very rare occurrence for a raptor of this size.

Dating back roughly 125 million years to the early Cretaceous Period, this ancient predator complexifies the evolutionary origins of feathers. In a study published today in Scientific Reports, paleontologists Junchang Lü and Steve Brusatte describe and analyze the new find, and address some of the questions it raises for the field.

"Zhenyuanlong is important for a couple of reasons," Brusatte told me over email. "One, it is the largest dinosaur that we yet know of that has big wings made up of layers of quill-pen feathers. Two, it is both large and has really short arms in proportion to its body size, much shorter than Microraptor, Velociraptor, and other bird-like dinosaurs, and much shorter than in true birds."

"So, this is the first time we are seeing a fairly large, short-armed dinosaur that has big wings," he continued. "This raises the question of why it has wings. It probably wasn't using them to glide or fly. The arms are probably just too short. So was it using them for display, or to brood eggs, or something else?"

This, Brusatte notes, actually brings up an even larger question: Why did dinosaurs evolve feathers in the first place? "A few years ago most everyone probably would have said that complex quill-pen feathers and wings evolved for flight," he said. "But the discovery of Zhenyuanlong, as well as some other discoveries and studies recently, cast doubt on that."

It's natural to assume that feathers are inherently linked with flight given the diversity of flying bird species on Earth today. But maybe the flight capabilities of feathers represent just one adaptive tangent—one that happened to really take off, literally and evolutionarily.

After all, even in modern birds, feathers have a variety of functions. "Today's birds, of course, use their wings to fly," said Brusatte, "but what we often forget is that wings are used for other things too, particularly display and protecting eggs in the nest."

"[N]ow that we're seeing fossils like Zhenyuanlong—bona fide dinosaurs that are fairly large (as far as close bird relatives go) and have short arms—which probably couldn't glide or fly or do anything very graceful in the air, but still have quill pen feathers and wings," he added, "I think it is becoming more and more plausible that quill pen feathers and wings evolved for something other than flight, and display seems like one of the more likelier hypotheses."

And if, speculatively speaking, display was driving the evolution of the Zhenyuanlong's thick coat of feathers, then imagine how spectacular these animals must have looked. After all, the avian descendants of these animals have become the undisputed experts of stunning visual performances (looking at you, birds of paradise and peacocks). With that in mind, it's not a stretch to suggest that their dromaeosaurid forebears were "peacocking" back in the day as well.

On top of that, female raptors have developed something of a reputation for being "clever girls" thanks to Jurassic Park, so presumably it would take a truly extraordinary display to impress them.

In the above concept drawing of Zhenyuanlong, paleoartist Zhao Chuang brings the reality of feathered raptors with expressive plumage to life. Why Universal persists in depicting raptors as naked, scaly predators when the truth is so much more colorful and vivid is beyond me—and most paleontologists.

"Our new dinosaur is one of the closest cousins of Velociraptor," Brusatte commented. "Everyone knows Velociraptor from Jurassic Park, but even the blockbuster Jurassic World still showed Velociraptor without feathers. The beautifully preserved fossil of Zhenyuanlong shows us what Velociraptor really would have looked like."

"If you saw Zhenyunalong alive, I think you would just consider it as another type of bird," he said. "[I]t is covered in feathers, and it has big wings made up of complex quill-pen feathers, just like modern birds do" though he noted that "we don't really know exactly what the wings were doing in Zhenyuanlong. Sometimes new fossils raise questions rather than answer them!"

Regardless of what this unusual animal's feathered plumage was used for, the fact that it was preserved at all speaks volumes about dromaeosaurid diversity and behavior in Cretaceous China. Raptors were still very much the efficient killing machines we see depicted in the movies, but new finds like Zhenyuanlong demonstrate that they were a lot more stylish and diverse than we ever imagined.