Explaining the Jurassic Park Raptors

A common explanation behind the “Velociraptors” is “they are Utahraptors! Duh!”

But what if the answer is not as simple as that? Because it probably isn’t.

Let’s start with the main thing: In the novel, Henry Wu says that the main genetic sample for the Raptors “came from China”.  Utahraptors did not live in China.  Another factor is that they are far too small to be Utahraptors.  In the novel, they are described as “six feet tall” and in the film, they are almost 15 feet long.  Utahraptors stood slightly taller than that height, but were almost 21 feet long.

So if they aren’t Utahraptors, what are they?

A lot of fans guessed Achillobator, and the truth is, I sincerely congratulate them for coming to this conclusion.  However, this is not likely the case.  Michael Crichton specifically stated that he modeled them after Deinonychus antirrhopus, and going by the rules of Paleo sci-fi, we have to assume that they are from the species that paleotologists knew existed at the time.  So why are they so tall? In the novels, Circhton seems to make them roughly six feet tall and eight feet long, fitting the more cube-like proportions Deinonychus antirrhopus was generally given back when it was given a more upright position than it is today, and back then, Deinonychus was classified by Gregory Paul as a kind of Velociraptor, and a common sci-fi rule about writing dinosaurs is to treat all species in the same genus as identical, so even though Crichton identified his creatures as Velociraptor mongoliensis, he gave them the features of “Velociraptor” antirrhopus.

So while technically the “Velociraptors” were just products of the knowledge of paleotology at the time (they don’t even have feathers for crying out loud!), we can still gauge a reasonably believable answer from the clues that we have in Jurassic Park media.  Aside from the fact that they are based on two Dromaeosaurs, Velociraptor and Deinonychus, there is much cause to believe in both novel canon and film canon that they are transgenic organisms.  Henry Wu in the novel explains that he used in a wide variety of DNA samples to complete the genomes of the dinosaurs, and the novelization of Jurassic World claims that the “Velociraptors” were actually created from multiple dromaeosaurs.  So if they’re transgenic, why are they bigger than most Deinonychus and all Velociraptors?

The answer lies in real-world hybrids.  Ligers and mules tend to be particularly gigantic in comparison to either parent.  The two main reasons are that with any given animal, especially with hybrids, the genetic potential for size lies primarily in the mother, an unevenness called genomic imprinting, and without a male mate of the same species to provide growth inhibiting or promoting genes, the hybrid offspring will have problems with growth dysplasia, especially if the mother belongs to a larger species than the father.  It’s plausible that the two main donors of the “raptors” were Velociraptor mongoliensis and Deinonychus antirrhopus, and while the fusion might have been achieved via something like CRISPR, the Deinonychus still somehow had a more “maternal” genetic contribution than the former, at least in terms of size, and without any growth regulation from another Deinonychus, the subsequent Raptors grew almost beyond the maximum size of the Deinonychus donor, just like with Ligers and mules.

When viewed from this perspective, it ceases to be any wonder that the Raptors became so completely out of control: They not only did they not know what they actually had, but they didn’t know what they made because they made something completely brand new.  They crossed over countless species, but they primarily crossed over two dromaeosaur species and made a dangerous, unstable hybrid.