If you met a Tyrannosaurus rex in a dark alleyway, your odds of survival would be pretty low, since that sucker would snap you into its jaws like a chicken nugget. Scary as a T-rex might be, though, the velociraptors in Jurassic Park are pure nightmare fuel: these lean, mean, death machines are smart enough to hunt in packs, know how to open doors, and can slash you open with the world's most menacing overgrown toenail...
If you met a Tyrannosaurus rex in a dark alleyway, your odds of survival would be pretty low, since that sucker would snap you into its jaws like a chicken nugget. Scary as a T-rex might be, though, the velociraptors in Jurassic Park are pure nightmare fuel: these lean, mean, death machines are smart enough to hunt in packs, know how to open doors, and can slash you open with the world's most menacing overgrown toenail...
Here's what we know for sure: velociraptors were meat eaters. The (smaller than you're probably picturing) carnivores, lived about 75 million years …
You've done all you can: visited your local animal shelter, found the perfect canine companion, and over the years that followed, regimented a strict training schedule to ensure that they would be faster, stronger, and more capable of opening doors than a velociraptor. You have done this knowing full well that, at any point, a doddering old Scotsman with a penchant for dead bug accessorization might summon forth from the genetic depths an army of prehistoric killing machines, and like the Pokemon Masters of old, you will only have your domesticated animals to defend you...
Robert Plot was the first person in the world to describe a dinosaur bone — that we know of, anyway. It was 1677, and the bone was so baffling that Plot concluded it must have been the femur of a giant. A human giant. But hey, you can't really blame the guy — in 1677 no one had any concept of dinosaurs (although dragons are kind of in the same neighborhood), and once he ruled out elephants, horses, and oxen, what other conclusions were left?
Prior to the year 1993, people became paleontologists for various reasons, including but not limited to: dino-nerdiness, book-nerdiness, and being nerdy in general. After 1993, people became paleontologists for one reason and one reason alone: Jurassic Park. Yes, a whole generation of dinosaur lovers was born in that moment where T-Rex rips the outhouse apart and then eats the poor dude who's cowering on the toilet. Before that, dinosaurs were either dusty fossils or stop-action animated embarrassments. Jurassic Park made them real. Jurassic Park brought them out of the nerd museum and into everyone's personal brain file of favorite movie monsters...
