Velociraptor had feathers, scientists say

Velociraptors, the vicious predator dinosaurs made famous in the film Jurassic Park, appear to have had feathers in real life, scientists reported Thursday.

The presence of quill knobs on the forearm of a velociraptor fossil represents direct evidence of the dinosaur's bird-like features, said the authors of a paper in the online edition of the journal Science.

"Finding quill knobs on velociraptor means that it definitely had feathers. This is something we'd long suspected, but no one had been able to prove," said Allan Turner, the lead author on the study, in a statement.

Turner and Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Peter Makovicky of Chicago's The Field Museum were looking at a fossil of a velociraptor found in Mongolia.

The predator was about 1.5 metres long and thought to weigh roughly 15 kg. The size of these animals was exaggerated in the film Jurassic Park, the authors said.

The quill knobs found are thought to be where a series of feathers were anchored to the bone with ligaments. No actual feather fossils were found, but the paleontologists said the knobs would not exist without feathers.

The scientists suggested the feathers wouldn't have been used for flight but may have been used for display, in shielding nests to control temperature, and to aid in running up and down steep inclines.

The finding is another piece of evidence towards the theory that modern birds descended from dinosaurs.

A number of therapods the bipedal dinosaur group that includes velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus rex have been discovered with evidence of feathers, but most of the evidence of this has been found in the smaller-bodied animals, of which fossils are more abundant, the authors said.

In April this year,scientists writing in Science said they had recovered a protein from the bone of a tyrannosaur that included five protein sequences found in chickens.