Velociraptors appearance in films
You must be impressed by the velociraptors when you watching films about dinosaurs.
But did you noticed that the images of velociraptors are always changed?
And I think the changes are somehow related to peoples altitude to Velociraptors.
To understand the change of velociraptor images, we should figure out the real appearance of them.
Real Velociraptors appearance
Firstly, we should have a basic idea—the images in the film are almost different from real velociraptors.
The velociraptor is a genus of dromaeosaurid theropod dinosaur that lived approximately 75 to 71 million years ago during the latter part of the Cretaceous Period.
Their fossil was firstly found in Mongolia, 1922. According to the research of its fossil, Velociraptor is a turkey-sized dinosaur, much smaller than what appeared in films(estimated about 2 meters in length). Michael Crichton once said that the raptor image he created in Jurassic Park referenced the Deinonychus.
Velociraptor and Deinonychus are cousins in the Dromaeosauridae family
And some evidence of the fossil shows it was feathered.
So the real Velociraptor should be like this one—
The real Velociraptor might be like this one
But, as we know, the feathered Velociraptors only appeared in a few film and documentary.
In this article, we only talk about the images in films which we are familiar with.
Velociraptors in Carnosaur
First is the Velociraptors in Carnosaur Trilogy.
Carnosaur Trilogy
The Carnosaur was released in 1993, the same year of Jurassic Park releasing. Unlike the meaningful Jurassic Park, the Carnosaur looks like monster films. Raptors image in Carnosaur Trilogy are closer to Lizard, their skull looks shorter, less room left to its brain. It also fits in with their brainless killer image.
Velociraptor in Carnosaur Trilogy
Absolutely, only a few people like the Velociraptor image in Carnosaur. And, they have little influence on popular dinosaur culture.
Now, let’s turn to the Jurassic Park Trilogy.
Velociraptor in Jurassic Park
Velociraptor in Jurassic Park
The Velociraptor in Jurassic Park is in dark brown skin color, few color spot on the skin, but not obvious. I think the artists who painted the Velociraptor skin is a little conservative at first. They made the skin texture with reference to reptiles that place restrictions on their minds.
Velociraptor in Jurassic Park 2
Velociraptors appearance in the Lost World
Velociraptors in The Lost World looks more bright—mainly light orange with dark stripe alongside the spine. It looks much avant-garde than the elder one. But, honestly, I prefer a darker skin color one.
Velociraptor in Jurassic Park 3
Velociraptors appearance in Jurassic Park 3
The Jurassic Park 3 is widely criticized for the plot—T-rex was killed by Spinosaurus which annoyed a lot of dinosaur lovers especially the T-rex’s fans. Because of that, the Raptors in Jurassic Park 3 caught less attention from people.
In fact, I think they are well designed, and some of the ideas about skin stripes are adopted by Jurassic World.
It is worth mentioning that it was the first and only time Velociraptors got feathered in Jurassic Park and Jurassic World.
Velociraptor in Jurassic World
The Blue Velociraptor appearance
Finally, we are going to talk about the most famous Velociraptor—The Blue in Jurassic World. Blue has bluish-gray skin with a white stripe with metallic blue in the middle going horizontally from her eye orbit, with one side has blue around the eye, while the other side’s stripe stops so at the head, down to the tip of her tail.
The other three raptors in Jurassic World are closed to the appearance of the Blue but without obvious blue stripes.
Young Velociraptors
The skin color of blue is awesome, and, as I mentioned it adopted some features from Velociraptors in Jurassic Park 3. Did you have noticed the light blue stripes alongside their spines?
Velociraptors appearance in Jurassic-Park 3
I think the skin color of blue Velociraptor fully gets rid of the limitation of the cold blood reptiles skin. It can better form an intelligence dinosaur image—they are not stupid monsters but a kind of smart creature with its own behaviors. We can also find that Velociraptors are not just bloody killers anymore during the skin color changing in films.
Because of the love for the Blue Velociraptor, there are a lot of products related to it. The Blue raptor costume is a popular one. I wrote an article about the realistic Blue Velociraptor costumes we made, click the link if you are interested—
The New Material Blue Velociraptor Costume
dinosaur-costume
Velociraptor in popular culture
Another thing is worth mentioning, it looks like we put too much human nature on the Blue raptors in film, it gradually turned to some kind of human protector. It might because of people’s love for Velociraptor in popular culture. However, I think it’s better to treat them as an independent creature species. Jurassic Park not only a thriller but also a film with self-examination about the Biotechnology.
But, it doesn’t matter what I think or you think, the reality is–people will change things to what they are familiar with and finally get tired of it.
I hope the true dinosaur lovers could think about what should we do to make the dinosaur culture with a long life.
Please share the article if you agree with my opinion.
