A Colossal Mistake? De-extincting the dire wolf and the forgotten lessons of the Heck cattle

I am sure you have heard the news. In broad letters on its title page, Time Magazine presented an article in which they proudly declared that the dire wolf is no longer extinct and the same could be true for many new species to come. A biotechnology company called Colossal Biosciences, after having already made “woolly mice” based on the genes of woolly mammoths, claims to have created three dire wolf pups based on ancient DNA, named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi (more on that particular naming choice later).

This has ruffled a lot of feathers, including mine, in fact so much that it is now bringing this blog back from hibernation. In the wake of this announcement, Time and various other news outlets, as well as social media, have spread some quite blatant misinformation and have not talked nearly enough about the ethical concerns, as well as the questionable conduct of Colossal in how they choose to present, or more accurately, market their projects. Moreover, I think there are many lessons from the past we are forgetting in this hype, for this is not the first questionable attempt at de-extinction and there are some remarkable parallels which bring to mind the cliché adage: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

These are not dire wolves

First, I think it needs to be clarified that what Colossal has produced cannot be called dire wolves by most measures. The three pups they have made are not clones of dire wolves nor do they have any of the original DNA of that species in them. In fact, it is impossible with current technology to clone a long-extinct animal, because how cloning currently works is that the nucleus of a living donor cell is transferred to a host egg cell. While it is possible to sequence the complete genome of extinct animals like the mammoth from permafrost remains, you cannot actually get that DNA to code again without the intact cell-machinery of a living nucleus. Unless some major technological breakthrough is achieved, the only viable way of de-extinction is therefore to take a modern living animal and edit its genes to resemble the extinct counterpart. This is exactly what happened here. As per the Time article, Colossal took the genome of the modern grey wolf (Canis lupus) and made edits to only 14 genes out of 19’000 in order to create something with a few traits which they think resembles the dire wolf, such as larger size, more muscles and, for some strange reason we will get to, white fur. The resulting embryos were then carried out by surrogate dog mothers. If you have been following the Chickenosaurus project of Jack Horner, all of that may sound familiar to you and said project has received similar criticisms as you will read here. But to give Horner credit where credit is due, he never claimed to directly recreate Tyrannosaurus or Velociraptor but has always been pretty open about how the project would ultimately just result in a new breed of chicken that looks a bit dinosaury.

Fig 1.: A modern reconstruction of Aenocyon dirus (the big dogs feasting on the bison, not the small wolves) made by the great paleoartist Mauricio Anton. The reddish fur colour is in line with our modern recognition of these animals as basal canines and their habitat preferences. 

The pups are therefore not clones, but imitations. Poor imitations at that. Aenocyon dirus has for a long time been thought to be a unique species of wolf, hence the outdated binomial Canis dirus, whose ancestors supposedly immigrated from Eurasia into North America. It has thus traditionally been depicted as a sort of uber-wolf. This old assumption was mainly based on the morphology of the bones. As of 2021, studies based on the genomes extracted from dire wolf bones, ironically the same data that Colossal should have based their work on, have shown a very different picture, which also has potential implications for the life appearance of the animal. They agree that the dire wolf was not a wolf at all, but instead a basal member of the Canini that lies wholly outside the genus Canis (Perri et al. 2021). In more simple terms, even jackals and African wild dogs are closer relatives of the grey wolf than Aenocyon. Their last common ancestor lived as far back as 5.7 million years ago. The similarity of Aenocyon to wolves is merely due to convergent evolution and it likely represents a distinct lineage that evolved endemically in the Americas, similar to (though not directly part of) the cerdocyonines, like the South American maned wolf Chrysocyon, which looks more like a cross of a deer and a fox. In short, what this means is that Colossal’s choice of the grey wolf as a base genome is highly questionable. Most other species of canine would have been just as appropriate and some like jackals and dholes would have likely resulted in more accurate-looking results.

The choice of a white fur colour to differentiate the pups from their grey wolf template is also pretty puzzling. Aenocyon dirus is only known from bones, its coloration therefore remains mere guesswork. I have seen Colossal on social media claim that in their genetic research they found white to be the most likely coloration for the species, but they do not seem to have published those findings in any peer-reviewed journal. This is very suspect, because uncovering the coloration of an extinct mammal based on DNA fragments alone would be sure to generate headlines. It generally also does not make sense with what we know about the animal. Yes, Aenocyon lived during the ice ages, but that does not mean it was a permanent tundra dweller living in snowy environments, where white fur is the most advantageous. Fossils of these animals are conspicuously absent from northern latitudes, their northernmost range being southern Canada (Dundas 1999). The most famous locality of the dire wolf are the La Brea Tar Pits and Los Angeles was not a chilly place, even during the Ice Age. Fossils of Aenocyon have even been found as far south as Venezuela and Chile. In general, the animal seems to have preferred environments that resemble the modern American prairie or even the African savannah. Mere logic would therefore dictate that it likely had short fur and more earthy colours to better blend in with the dry vegetation. White, shaggy fur would have made these animals prone to overheating, too conspicuous to successfully sneak upon prey and also would have made them easy targets for other predators, including humans. If Colossal is right, maybe that’s why the dire wolf is extinct… but I think a wholly different aspect than scientific accuracy was chosen in making Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi white, one we will get to later.

Fig. 2: Modern genetic research recovers Aenocyon dirus (here still labelled  Canis dirus) as being outside of the true wolves and actually being intermediate somewhere between cerdocyonines and the canine lineage leading up to jackals, dholes and actual wolves.

This makes the claim of Beth Shapiro, CSO of Colossal Biosciences, that the pups should be considered dire wolves de facto because they share key anatomical traits, all the more dubious. They simply do not resemble what Aenocyon would have likely looked like. Moreover, Shapiro seems to be using a purely morphology-based approach to the definition of species, as per the Time article. This was what biologists used in the eighteenth century, before evolution or extinction was even known, and has long been supplanted by genetic and phylogenetic approaches to species definitions, as well as Ernst Mayr’s classic biological definition of interbreeding populations. Not even paleontologists, who often cannot work with genetic data, use purely morphological criteria to distinguish species anymore, but use complex cladistic computer-modelling and probability to determine if lineages can be considered distinct enough to warrant different names. I would bet money that if the DNA, skeletons or both of Romulus and Remus were fed into such a cladistic program, they would still be recovered as some type of Canis lupus or at least Canis, not Aenocyon. Speaking of Ernst Mayr, it is important to note that the same studies which recovered Aenocyon as a distinct lineage of American canine also found exactly zero evidence that it ever interbred with members of the genus Canis, once true wolves migrated to the Americas (Perri et al. 2021), showing that they were way too distinct to be able to hybridize. Romulus and Remus, however, still sharing 99.93% of their DNA with their grey wolf template, would no doubt still be able to father viable children with a wolf mother.

The story of the Mock-Aurochs

The idea of de-extinction is not quite as new as people may think. Ever since the infancy of vertebrate paleontology, people have been obsessed with seeing charismatic megafauna in the flesh again, such as when Thomas Jefferson asked Lewis and Clark to look out for any surviving mastodons on their westward expedition. The idea of using genetic engineering specifically to recreate extinct animals also goes farther back than one might expect, though back then it used to be called good, old-fashioned selective breeding. Beginning in the 1920s, the brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck, living in Weimar Germany, attempted to recreate the extinct aurochs, Bos primigenius, by crossbreeding various types of cattle until they ended up with a breed that they thought looked and behaved sufficiently primitive enough. The original goal was to preserve the memory of the species, because the brothers feared that too many people were mistaking historical mentions of the aurochs with the still-living wisent (the European bison).

Fig. 3: Modern specimens of the Heck cattle.

With the fall of the Weimar Republic and the takeover of Hitler, the project saw support by the Nazi regime. Lutz Heck appealed to them by proposing that the aurochs could be used as an instrument of their Lebensraum-Politik, as rewilding it into the primordial forests of Eastern Europe would, in their eyes, authentically recreate the original primitive homeland of the Germanic people (Driessen & Lorimer 2016). This was not done out of any ecological interest, but rather because the Nazis dreamt of a scenario where their freetime consisted of recreationally hunting aurochs for sport like their ancestors supposedly did. Hermann Göring took an especial liking to the Heck cattle, seeing the aurochs as a symbol of German Urkraft and in a sense using them as tools of colonization during the conquest of Eastern Europe. He released the first specimens in 1938 in his personal hunting range in the Romincka Forest, which is today in Kaliningrad. The next batch was released in 1941 in the Polish Białowieża Forest, after displacing and killing numerous local villagers in order to expand this nature preserve (Driessen & Lorimer 2016). Further plans were only halted by the collapse of the Eastern Front and the advance of the Soviets.

Today, the Heck cattle survive merely as curiosities in some European zoos and wildlife parks. The few Göring specimens that survived the Red Army were all later killed by Polish farmers, due to being aggressive and dangerous. The only wild populations today are documented in the Netherlands and Latvia, where the animals have trouble surviving, due to still being domestic cattle and therefore not being adapted to cope well with winters and wolves. The Heck cattle project has been described by historians as misguided from the very beginning, even before being retooled by Nazi ambitions. The Heck brothers worked off inaccurate and idiosyncratic assumptions of the aurochs’ life appearance and so all experts today do not deem the Heck cattle an accurate reconstruction of the extinct animal (Van Vuure, 2005). Various southern European domestic breeds, especially Spanish fighting bulls, are seen as being genetically and morphologically closer to the aurochs than the Heck cattle ever were. Both ecologically and scientifically they are therefore close to worthless.

Fig. 4.: Graphic showing the notable differences between the extinct aurochs (top) and the modern mock recreation of the Heck cattle (bottom).

I hope some of the parallels are clear here, though the Heck cattle are arguably closer to their intended goal than the Colossal wolves, because domestic cattle are at the very least still direct descendants of the aurochs. The methodology and standards used by Colossal Biosciences in bringing back the dire wolf are really not too dissimilar to what the Heck brothers tried to do. As there is no ancient DNA directly involved in its creation, the phenotype Colossal wanted to create could have theoretically also been produced just as well by selectively breeding grey wolves for desired traits. Gene-editing with CRISPR is arguably just a faster way to get the same results. And that result would still be an unusual grey wolf, not a resurrected dire wolf. Add to that the fact that, again, said phenotype is not actually accurate to what we know from palaeontological and genetic data, and you are instead very quickly looking at dire consequences.

Granted, Colossal is obviously not as sinister as the Nazis, because they claim that they want to rewild the dire wolf and various other extinct animals, like the mammoth and thylacine, as a form of ecological restoration and also claim this is paying back nature for the negative impact humans have made. But the results would still look the same, even if their “dire wolves” were 100% accurate to the real thing. If Colossal indeed were to rewild a viable breeding population of their mock wolves into the Americas, they would not magically fill out the ecological niche Aenocyon once occupied. That niche simply does not exist anymore. Its whole ecosystem does not exist anymore. The end of the Pleistocene saw the extinction of 35 genera of mammals alone in North America (Faith & Surovell 2009), most of which were megafauna that the dire wolf relied on for its diet. Without recreating that ecosystem, the dire wolves would instead be forced to compete for the same prey animals as regular wolves and coyotes, negatively impacting the ecology of those two species and their prey. Just like the Heck cattle, they would also come into conflict with farmers, hunters and poachers, quickly leading to their second extinction. In the most likely and optimistic case, however, due to their aforementioned genetic similarity, the Colossal wolves would simply bond and interbreed with populations of regular grey wolves, which in turn means that their genome and phenotype would stop being a distinct entity and just become part of the wider grey wolf gene pool.

Similar problems can be imagined for a variety of other hypothetically rewilded extinct animals. What life would a mammoth herd in modern Siberia or Alaska realistically live now that climate change is destroying the permafrost? What ecological changes would such large and destructive animals create that would bring them into conflict with the local humans? What prospects does a thylacine realistically have in an Australia that is now overrun by dingoes, cane toads and, worst of all, Australians?

As per the Time article, in addition to their de-extinction programs, Colossal is also cloning the extant red wolf in hopes of preserving the species and introducing more genetic variety into the population. This is in theory more defensible, but cloned animals are on average much less healthy than regular-born individuals, so in the end this does not seem nearly as effective as regular wildlife preservation methods (such as those employed in preserving the cheetah), which mainly focus on keeping the habitats of the animals intact and free from disturbance, so that genetic variety can recover on its own. This all opens up the question of why even bother? I have various reasons to believe that ecology is not at the forefront of Colossal’s concerns, despite their claims.

Genetic Engineering and Extinct Animals in the Age of Capitalism

I have purposefully not brought up Jurassic Park until now, because it simply is cliché and not really a comparable situation. The story’s Ingen company was at least honest about the fact that their products could not live in the wild without causing major damage to ecology and human life and therefore had to be restricted to an artificial theme park. Instead, I would like to draw attention to another science fiction novel. Authored by Stephen Baxter in 2002 and simply titled Evolution, the book is a retelling of human evolution from the earliest primates in the Cretaceous all the way until the far future. A little creative project on my Patreon is heavily inspired by it, but also written in opposition to its cynical tone. The frame story Baxter uses is that of Joan Useb, a paleontologist from Kenya, and primatologist Alyce Sigurdardottir, who in the year 2031 are invited to a conference in Rabaul, where scientists of many different fields meet to discuss solutions to climate change as well as societal and ecological collapse. There they meet star geneticist Alison Scott, as well as Scott’s daughter Bex, a genetically enriched designer-child with blue hair and orange eyes. During the course of the conference, the following happens:

Alison Scott was talking to the camera. She was a tall, imposing woman. ‘… My field is in the evolution of development. Evo-devo, in tabloid speak. The goal is to understand how to regrow a lost finger, say. You do that by studying ancestral genes. Put together a bird and a crocodile and you can glimpse the genome of their common ancestor, a pre-dinosaur reptile from around two hundred and fifty million years ago. Even before the end of the twentieth century one group of experimenters were able to “turn on” the growth of teeth in a hen’s beak. The ancient circuits are still there, subverted to other purposes; all you have to do is look for the right molecular switch…’

Joan raised her eyebrows. ‘Good grief. You’d think it was her event.’

‘The woman’s work is show business,’ Alyce said with cold disapproval. ‘Nothing more, nothing less.’

With flourish, Alison Scott tapped the box beside her. One wall turned transparent. There was a gasp from the pressing crowd – and, beyond that, a subdued hooting. Scott said ‘Please bear in mind that what you see here is a generic reconstruction, no more. Details such as skin colour and behaviour have essentially had to be invented…’

‘My God,’ said Alyce.

The creature in the box looked like a chimp, to a first approximation. No more than a metre tall, she was female; her breasts and genitalia were prominent. But she could walk upright. Joan could tell that immediately from the peculiar sideways-on geometry of her hips. However right now she wasn’t walking anywhere. She was cowering in a corner, her long legs jammed up against her chest.

Bex said, ‘I told you, Dr. Useb, you don’t have to go scraping for bones in the dust. Now you can meet your ancestors. 

Despite herself, Joan was fascinated. Yes, she thought: to meet my ancestors, all those hairy grandmothers. That is what my life’s work has really been all about. Alison Scott evidently understands the impulse. But can this poor chimera ever be real? And if not- what were they really like?

Bex impulsively grasped Alyce’s hand. ‘And, you see?’ Her crimson eyes were shining. ‘I did say you didn’t have to be upset about the loss of the bonobos.’

Alyce sighed. ‘But, child, if we have no room for the chimps, where will we find room for her?’

The mock australopithecine, terrified, bared her teeth in a panic grin. (Baxter 2002, p. 285 – 286)

A mock Australopithecus is more outrageous than a mock Aenocyon, but we are seeing today basically the same situation play out in real life. Just like the unfortunate ape, there is no place or chance for the wolf pups to live outside of an artificial environment. This is outright admitted in the Time article: Due to the way they had to be raised, the “dire wolves” and even the cloned red wolves do not actually know how to survive in the wild and are therefore destined to live out their fate in captivity. How the company plans to solve this obvious problem to their rewilding efforts, I have not been able to deduce. The sole reason these organisms exist for now, and maybe forever, is for showmanship. In the story, Alison Scott uses the modified chimpanzee merely to showcase the versatility of her genetic research, with the main purpose being to modify humanity itself into a new species capable of withstanding all of the current troubles (with a sinister hint that she maybe intents to divide our species into castes to stop social unrest, à la Brave New World). Colossal does something similar by proposing genetic de-extinction as an easy solution to all of the current ecological problems we are facing. It is no big deal that the red wolf is critically endangered, we can just clone it back. It is no big deal that the quoll is going extinct due to cane toads, we can just make them resistant to the amphibians’ poison. It is not too dissimilar from tech bros proposing that general AI, libertarianism or Mars colonization will be our saviours, despite all of these also being just pipedreams. The modern world is facing complex problems that cannot be solved with a holy grail, they all require a coordinated group-effort on multiple fronts. Often, private companies are actually opposed to such efforts, because it means they cannot have the monopoly on selling you the solution to the problem that the system they inhabit has caused. A snake oil salesman would rather you buy his homeopathic globuli for your cancer rather than you undergoing surgery.

In my view, it is all just marketing, aimed to generate financial support from investors and a public easily wooed by headlines. Marketing using living designer organisms. This is especially obvious by Colossal’s social media presence. Did you know that they have a Reddit account? And that account is the moderator of r/deextinction? A day ago, said account posted this image on r/gameofthrones:

Fig. 5.: "George RR Martin said we could post this here—the Colossal dire wolves sitting on the Iron Throne", the image caption reads. I see how it is George, you'd rather let ethical horrors beyond human comprehension happen in your name before finishing Winds of Winter.

I do not know about you, but I find it very concerning to see these supposedly scientifically important organisms, merely a few months old, being used for a kitschy photoshoot meant to generate online clicks and upvotes due to the association with a popular TV show. It is no less gut-wrenching than a mock australopithecine cowering in a glass box for all eyes to oggle at. But now so much makes sense. Why one of the pups is named Khaleesi, why they used grey wolves as the genetic template, why they made their fur white. They did not want to create real Aenocyon dirus. They wanted to make something people would recognize from Game of Thrones, where the dire wolves are portrayed by CGI-enhanced Utonagan dogs and where the most prominent individual, Jon Snow’s pet Ghost, is white. In this sense, and really only in this instance, Colossal is really pulling a Jurassic Park, but in particular the one scene from Jurassic World where Dr. Wu admits: “You didn’t ask for reality, you asked for more teeth.”

There are two ways to frame this story. The most charitable is that Colossal is truly concerned about wildlife preservation and that projects such as the red wolf cloning are the main focus. In this case, all that marketing circus around de-extinction is a way to keep investors interested and keep funds flowing into the actually important projects. But this would still be at the ethical expense of creating organisms merely for marketing stunts that can afterwards not live out an authentic life. The animals as well as the company would be victims of a capitalist hellscape that does not see inherent value in ecology.

The more cynical view is that the de-extinction truly is the main (and vain) focus, which makes it even more questionable what the point is, seeing, as we have discussed, that there is no realistic prospect of these animals being successfully reintroduced into the wild. Seeing all the “brand synergy” with Game of Thrones, the obvious appeal the company wants to make to nerd culture and remembering the story of the Heck cattle, one fears more sinister motives. Just like the Nazis wanted a formidable hunting target in form of the aurochs, could you not as easily see Colossal in the near future try to sell their mock dire wolves as exotic pets to rich nerds? You can already imagine the marketing lines: “Get your own Ghost! Feel like a true Stark! Winter is coming!”

They would make fine additions to chickenosaurs, woolly mice, quollacyines, dovedodos and whatever else may be cooked up in the lab that will resemble actual prehistoric life about as much as David Peters reconstructions. Pugs and chihuahuas will look quaint in retrospective, we are maybe about to see the new age of GMO pets as living accessories and commodities shaped solely to chase pop culture and social media trends.

If you liked this and other articles, please consider supporting me on Patreon. I am thankful for any amount, even if it is just 1$, as it will help me at dedicating more time to this blog and related projects. Patrons also gain early access to the draft-versions of these posts and my art.

Related articles:

• What really are the Jurassic Park Raptors supposed to be?

References:

• Baxter, Stephen: Evolution. A novel, London 2002.
• Driessen, Clemens & Lorimer, Jamie: Back-breeding the aurochs. The Heck brothers, National Socialism and imagined geographies for nonhuman Lebensraum, in: P. Giaccaria and C. Minca (Hrsg.): Hitler’s Geographies. Chicago 2016, p.138-157.
• Dundas, Robert: Quaternary records of the dire wolf, Canis dirus, in North and South America, in: Boreas, 28, p. 375 – 385.
• Faith, Tyler & Surovell, Todd: Synchronous extinction of North America's Pleistocene mammals, in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106, 2009, p. 20641–20645.
• Kluger, Jeffrey: The Return of the Dire Wolf, in: Time Magazine, April 7, 2025.
• Perri, Angela; Mitchell, Kieren; Mouton Alice; et al.: Dire wolves were the last of an ancient New World canid lineage, in: Nature, 591, 2021, p. 87 – 91.
• Van Vuure, Cis: Retracing the Aurochs. History, Morphology and Ecology of an extinct wild Ox, Chicago 2005.

Image sources:

• Fig. 1: National Geographic
• Fig. 2.:  Perri et al. 2021.
• Fig. 3.: Wikimedia
• Fig. 4.: Wikimedia   
• Fig. 5.: This Reddit post
  

What really are the Jurassic Park Raptors supposed to be?

Fig 1: Many people may be surprised to know that the genus Velociraptor has been known since 1924. It however never gained much popularity until 1993’s release of the movie Jurassic Park. As such, appearances of it in art, books or let alone movies before the 90s are quite rare. Here we see one of those rare pre-90s depictions of the animal, made in 1975 by none other than Zdeněk Burian. The lizard in the foreground is Macrocephalosaurus, now classified as Gilmoreteius. Take that as foreshadowing.

Being born in 1998, most of the shows and documentaries I grew up with as a child (such as Dinosaur Planet and When Dinosaurs Roamed America on Discovery Channel) already portrayed dromaeosaurs as small, feathered and very bird-like animals and this is naturally how I now prefer them being portrayed. Despite already knowing at about age 6 that these movies were outdated, I am nonetheless a big fan of the Jurassic Park franchise, especially the original trilogy (yes, even the third one) and its surrounding media, as they allow me to imagine what the 90s Dinomania must have been like. Naturally, I also love to speculate about the in-universe lore of the series. One of the most fascinating topics of discussion are the stars or “main villains” of the movies, the Velociraptors. At this point it is probably common knowledge that, unlike the movie-version, the real-life Velociraptor mongoliensis was a turkey-sized, fully feathered animal (and yes, we do know for a fact that it had feathers thanks to phylogenetic bracketing and obvious quill-knobs along its arms) that would have resembled a hawk with teeth more than a bipedal monitor lizard. Even the newest Animal Crossing game has made fun of this fact, just ask Blathers! This obvious discrepancy, especially the one in size, has led a lot of people to question if the JP raptors are really meant to be Velociraptor or are actually an entirely different genus of dromaeosaur, with suggestions like Deinonychus, Utahraptor, Achillobator and Dakotaraptor often being thrown around. This post here was in part inspired by a recent blogpost by Mark Witton where he commented that he thinks at this point the JP raptors are not meant to represent any specific species, but just a generalized image of an eudromaeosaur. Many other speculations abound and I am sure many people reading this already have heard of or made up their own theories on the matter. This is basically just my personal take based on the available evidence, though I also want to clear up some common misconceptions I have heard from time to time.

Before we start I just want to clarify that I will refer to dromaeosaurs as “raptors” here purely for convenience sake. Personally I am still of the opinion that the term should be reserved for birds of prey specifically in other discussions to avoid confusion.

The case for the novel

Before there were any movies, there was just a novel by Michael Crichton, released in 1990 and taking place in 1989. While there are some important differences, the novel and the movie roughly follow the same plot and one of the main threats is a dromaeosaur classified in-universe as Velociraptor. Nowadays it is however general consensus that the raptors featured in the novel are actually Deinonychus, but there exist two different claims as to why its name was changed. Either A) Crichton just found the name Velociraptor cooler and allowed himself some artistic license or B) Crichton was following a controversial classification scheme at the time. As I think we will see, both versions of the story are essentially correct without contradicting each other.

Fig. 2: Deinonychus, a wolf-sized dromaeosaur from North America, as originally reconstructed by Robert Bakker for John Ostrom in 1969. The image, as well as the dinosaur, kickstarted the Dinosaur Renaissance and became the prototype of what the general public thinks a “raptor” looks like. Apart from it obviously lacking feathers, much of our anatomical knowledge about this dinosaur has changed too, especially the head-shape and hand-posture. 

Since its first description in 1969 up to 1993, Deinonychus antirrhopus was THE dromaeosaur known to the general public and in the focus of paleontologists, as it was the largest of its kind known up to that point, kickstarted the Dinosaur Renaissance and revived the hypothesis that birds descend from dinosaurs. Its smaller cousin Velociraptor, despite being known since 1924, was never popular and barely featured in books until the release of the first Jurassic Park movie. The most important researcher of Deinonychus at the time was of course its discoverer, John Ostrom. As Ostrom once recounted in an interview, after Crichton finished writing The Andromeda Strain, the author actually contacted the paleontologist to specifically ask him about details concerning Deinonychus, such as its range of motion and behaviour. Crichton was doing some research for his next novel. Ostrom further recounts that after Jurassic Park released, Crichton admitted to him that he based the novel’s raptors in pretty much every detail on Deinonychus, but chose the name of its relative Velociraptor as he thought it would sound more dramatic to an audience which probably did not understand Greek.

Fig. 3: As attested in the novel’s acknowledgements, Greg Paul’s book here was a great influence on Michael Crichton while writing Jurassic Park. The dinosaur on the cover is Yangchuanosaurus shangyouensis, known from nearly complete remains from the Middle Jurassic of China, but Paul classified it as a species of the genus Metriacanthosaurus (Paul 1988, p. 290-292), otherwise known from only a few bones found in England. Likely as a reference to this book, we can see in the movie, when Dennis Nedry is stealing dinosaur embryos, a testtube with the name Metriacanthosaurus on it, implying that the animal was being cloned for the park. Lately Metriacanthosaurus even appeared in the videogame Jurassic World Evolution, once again stealing the fame from the much better known Yangchuanosaurus. I am starting to see a pattern here.

Another main inspiration for Crichton (and the movies) was however also the book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, written by Gregory S. Paul and released in 1988 (just one year before the events of the novel are supposed to take place). The book was one of the most thorough and comprehensive guides to theropod dinosaurs at the time and included many, now iconic, illustrations by Paul. However, it also lives on in a bit of infamy, as Paul expressed some quite controversial opinions in it. The thing he is still a bit infamous for today are his classification schemes. Paul is what taxonomists would call a “lumper” as he is fond of lumping/synonymizing taxa together under the same genus. There is nothing necessarily wrong about that if there are good reasons to do so, and some of Paul’s reclassifications have nowadays become consensus, such as Syntarsus/Megapnosaurus actually being a species of Coelophysis. However, many of his other classifications, such as both Styracosaurus and Pachyrhinosaurus actually being species of Centrosaurus, are either highly controversial or outright rejected today. The suggestions that Jack Horner gets hated on nowadays are a joke compared to the stuff Paul has sometimes proposed. It should be mentioned for fairness that Paul defended most of his ideas by using the standards some taxonomists use on modern living animals, such as the fact that lions, tigers, jaguars and leopards are all classified under the genus Panthera or that nearly all monitor lizards, from the nile monitor to the Komodo dragon and even Megalania, are classified under the genus Varanus. There are however zoologists who argue that even these genera, especially Varanus, are overlumped and should be split up. Anyway, the most infamous suggestion from Predatory Dinosaurs of the World was Paul’s decision that Deinonychus, Velociraptor and Saurornitholestes (poor guy gets always left out in these discussions) are similar enough to all be classified under the same genus, which would be Velociraptor, as it was the first one described and its name therefore has priority. Deinonychus antirrhopus therefore became Velociraptor antirrhopus. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a nearly direct reference to this in the Jurassic Park novel:

“‘What do you know about Velociraptor?’ Grant asked Tim. He was just making conversation. ‘It was a small carnivore that hunted in packs, like Deinonychus’ Tim said. ‘That’s right’ Grant said ‘although Deinonychus is now considered one of the velociraptors. And the evidence for pack-hunting is all circumstantial.” (Crichton 1990, p. 129).

Earlier in the book Grant also digs up a fossil in Montana, where Deinonychus is found, and identifies it as Velociraptor antirrhopus (p. 46). It is interesting that he mentions the reclassification of Deinonychus like it has become a fact and I actually have seen some people nowadays who seem to think that this was an actual consensus in the 80s/90s and that Michael Crichton was therefore just adhering to the science of the time. Just to be very clear: He was not. Greg Paul was the only person who has suggested this reclassification and it seemed ludicrous to everyone else even back in the 80s, when people were cutting their hair into mullets. The two species not only lived on different continents and showed numerous anatomical differences, but also lived about 40 million years apart. Together with the evidence from above it seems very obvious to me that Crichton renamed his version of Deinonychus purely for dramatic effect and then tried to present Paul’s classification as a popular opinion to give his choice at least a semblance of validity. In-universe that means that Jurassic Park seems to takes place in an alternative universe where, against all odds, Paul’s classification won. Or Grant simply has very eccentric opinions. His character, together with his Maiasaura research, is based on Jack Horner after all…

Fig. 4: Deinonychus antirrhopus or what Gregory S. Paul, the illustrator, called Velociraptor antirrhopus. Yes, he illustrated dinosaurs, in fact all small theropods from Velociraptor to Coelophysis, with feathers as far back as the 80s when this idea was still highly speculative, something which I think he does not get enough credit for. This is unfortunately the one major aspect of his paleoart that neither made it into Michael Crichton’s novel nor the movie.

While I do think the most likely identification of the novel raptors is that they are Deinonychus, there are a few discrepancies which might open up a few other possibilities. First and foremost, Dr. Henry Wu, the park’s chief geneticist, identifies at least one of the raptors as Velociraptor mongoliensis (p. 127), not V. antirrhopus, which would be the “correct” name if they were meant to be Deinonychus. However, he was referring to a six week old, small juvenile animal specifically. If the large, adult raptors in the park, which cause a lot of chaos later in the novel, are also classified by the staff as V. mongoliensis is never stated clearly. It could well be possible that they are V. antirrhopus and the juvenile is a new species that has recently been added to the park. This could very well explain why the adult raptors later in the novel eat said juvenile instead of caring for it, as they recognize it is as not being the same species as theirs. A further hint towards this is that near the end of the story we see the raptors caring for their children (p. 434), which makes me doubt that they are meant to be presented as compulsive cannibals. However, what speaks against there being two raptor species in the park is that the juvenile and the adults are described as having essentially the same colouration of a yellow-brownish body with reddish tiger-stripes (p. 130). Later in the novel some raptors are described with dark-green bodies and brownish stripes (p. 433), though it is possible that they are just meant to be the male raptors. The adult raptors who eat the juvenile have also been isolated from the rest of the island’s raptor-population and are therefore more prone to erratic behaviour. Regardless, while it is not outright stated, there does seem to be an insinuation that the park’s geneticists, or at least Dr. Wu, have misclassified the animals. The only concrete reason he cites as to why the raptor is classified as V. mongoliensis is that the amber from which it was cloned came from China (p. 127). This is particularly odd, as V. mongoliensis has so far only been found in Mongolia (Velociraptor osmolskae was found in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China, but it has only been discovered in 2008, long after the book was written). A bit earlier Wu talks about how the park’s geneticists do not exactly know what they are cloning from the ambers until it hatches for the first time. This he does while talking about a batch of eggs which he presumes will be “coelurusaurus”, what he thinks is a small herbivore (p. 119). Firstly, while there is a vast dinosaur group called Coelurosauria and a genus named Coelurus, there is no one dinosaur genus actually called Coelurusaurus (there is Coelurusauravus, but that is a small gliding reptile from the Permian). Secondly, if he indeed meant Coelurus or a basal coelurosaur, that would have been a small carnivorous animal similar to Ornitholestes, not a herbivore. Interestingly the name Coelurusaurus is not written in italics, unlike all the other dinosaur names in the novel, so Crichton was perhaps aware of this and was trying to drop a hint at the reader that Wu was mainly a geneticist and not a paleontologist and therefore not very knowledgeable when it came to dinosaur classification. The character even outright states that he is overwhelmed with keeping track of dinosaur names (p. 119). It is therefore still possible that the raptors really are Deinonychus, but are misclassified out-of-universe by Crichton and in-universe by Wu.
Another possible point against the novel-raptors being Deinonychus (or Velociraptor for that matter) could be their size. Though the narration makes them seem about man-sized, as far as I could find their exact size is never mentioned. The head of one of the raptors is however described as being two feet long (p. 130), meaning 60.96 centimeters in non-barbaric units of measurement. At maximum, the skull-length of Deinonychus, the largest known dromaeosaur at the time of the novel, was 41 centimeters, with most specimens only having a length of about 31. Assuming that proportions on the rest of the body are similarly scaled up, the novel-raptors might therefore be nearly twice as large as an average Deinonychus (or were very funny-looking bobble-heads). It is possible that the in-universe explanation for this might have been genetic meddling, growth hormones or simply the benefits of living in captivity in the park. The out-of-universe explanation is, like the name-change, probably dramatic effect. However, if we consider that Crichton read Greg Paul’s Predatory Dinosaurs of the World thoroughly, he would have probably come across this passage:

“Teeth and some slender second-toe bones indicate that a new, small species of Velociraptor was present in the very latest Cretaceous of Western North America. Even more interesting is a tooth of the same age that Malcolm McKenna has at the AMNH: It indicates that a species as big or bigger than V. antirrhopus was alive then, although it seems much less common than the smaller form. Also at the AMNH is a hyper-extendable toe bone from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia that looks like a Velociraptor far bigger than V. antirrhopus.” (Paul 1988, p. 366).

I unfortunately have never been able to find out much more about the specimens mentioned here by Paul. It seems possible that the large North American raptor tooth might be referring to the very first (and at the time still undescribed/unrecognized) remains of Utahraptor that Jim Jensen found in 1975, though these finds were largely left unnoticed at the time and were stored at the Brigham Young University, not the AMNH (American Museum of Natural History). Utahraptor also lived in the Early, not Late Cretaceous. The large claw, as believed by the blog Dinosaurs on the Silver Screen, could be AMNH 6572, a dromaeosaurid claw collected in 1933 by Edwin H. Colbert in the Iren Dabasu Formation that still remains unclassified. It could not have been Achillobator (a 4.5 to 5 meter long dromaeosaurid from Mongolia that would fit the dimensions of the JP raptors quite well) as many people like to believe, as its holotype was found in 1989 (one year after Paul’s book was published) by a Russian-Mongolian expedition in the Bayan Shireh Formation, stored in the Mongolian National University and was only officially described in 1999. Regardless of what these giant raptor claws were that Paul was referring to, he classified them as Velociraptor and their account may have given Michael Crichton the inspiration and justification to make his novel’s raptors larger than life while still calling them by that name. If Crichton really was basing his raptors on this passage, the JP raptors might therefore unintentionally be neither Velociraptor mongoliensis nor Deinonychus, but a species of dromaeosaur that remains unnamed to this day.

Fig. 5: Again Greg Paul’s “Velociraptor antirrhopus”, shown attacking the ornithopod Tenontosaurus. Nowadays it is seen as unlikely that dromaeosaurs like this hunted in packs, with the newest evidence against pack-hunting even coming from a study on tooth-enamel. In general the intelligence of dromaeosaurs has been highly exaggerated in the media thanks to Jurassic Park. In reality their brain-to-body mass-ratio was about on the same level as that of modern ratites, such as emus and ostriches, not parrots or corvids. In all fairness they would have still been among the smartest animals around in their time, though looking at their competition that is not saying much.

As mentioned earlier, Dr. Wu in the novel states that the InGen-geneticists do not exactly know what they are cloning until it hatches for the first time. This very much leaves the possibility open that the company might have cloned animals that (at the time) were unknown to paleontology and were thus unintentionally misclassified (which leaves enough head-canon open for the JP raptors to be a wide number of genera, though without much confirmation). This is something that is never really brought up again in the franchise. The closest thing was a scrapped backstory for the Indominus rex in Jurassic World, which originally did not see it be a hybrid created in a lab, but instead a fictional dinosaur species from China (looking like a mix between Spinosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus, definitely better than the rip-off of the Vastatosaurus from King Kong that we got) that was cloned for the park without any knowledge of what it really was or how it would behave, leading to havoc. It is unfortunate that this sort of risk has never been addressed again, as the large unpredictability of bringing an animal back to life that has never been witnessed by a human being was a major theme in the first novel. It could also explain some of the many inaccuracies that the franchise faces. For example, the movie’s Dilophosaurus (ignorning the anatomically impossible pronated wrists for the moment) is perhaps neither a genetic abomination nor a juvenile (a popular fan-theory even endorsed by Stan Winston), but instead a small dinosaur unknown to science that genuinely possessed a neck-frill and venom glands and, based on the two headcrests, was just misclassified by incompetent InGen-scientists as a mishappen Dilophosaurus. Call it Nublarsaurus, if you will.

The case for the movies

At first it seems that, much like the novel, the raptors in the Jurassic Park movie are actually Deinonychus. First, apart from the fact that they look like how Deinonychus would have been reconstructed in the early 90s, the production team of the movie requested John Ostrom to send them all of his papers and data on Deinonychus. Second, Dr. Grant digs up a “Velociraptor” in Monatana at the beginning of the movie, not in Mongolia. The biggest smoking gun however is that a version of the script from 1991 literally calls them Deinonychus, as does Mark McCreery’s concept art for the movie on which the final designs were based on. Why exactly the name was changed again later is not clear, though it was most likely to make the movie line up more with the novel. Or perhaps it was because Gregory S. Paul literally was one of the scientific advisors on the movie. Of course, we again have the problem that the animals in the movie are a lot larger than either Deinonychus or Velociraptor (in part because in some shots they had to be played by adult men in animatronic suits). Here a common misconception people have is that the large sizes of the movie’s raptors are based on the then new discovery of Utahraptor and that therefore the JP raptors could be interpreted as actually being that genus. Utahraptor was first officially described and named on the eighteenth of June in 1993, a bit over a week after the first release of the movie. But, like mentioned before, remains of it were known since 1975 (though then largely unrecognized) and the holotype was discovered in 1991 by James Kirkland and Robert Gaston. Nonetheless, it seems that by all accounts the staff working on Jurassic Park were not aware of the discovery until after the size-change was already made. As paleontologist Robert T. Bakker recounts in Raptor Red:

“‘The claw we’ve got- it’s huge!’ I could hear Jim jumping up and down at the other end of the line, and I started jumping up and down too, because I knew something he didn’t. ‘Jim, Jim-Jim!’ I yelled. ‘You just found Spielberg’s raptor.’

‘Huh?’

‘You just found the giant raptor Spielberg made up for his movie, you know – Jurassic Park.’

Jim thought I was daft. He didn’t know about the other phone call I had gotten about giant raptors that morning. It was from one of the special-effects artists working in the Jurassic Park skunk works, the studio where the movie monsters for Spielberg’s film were being fabricated in hush hush conditions. The artists were suffering secret anxiety about what was to become the star of the movie – a raptor species of a size that had never been documented by a real fossil. No one outside the studio besides me knew about the problem with Spielberg’s giant raptor. No professional dinosaurologist was aware of the supersize raptor being manufactured for the movie. […] The artists doing Jurassic Park wanted the latest info on all the species they were reconstructing. They wanted everything to be right. They’d been calling me once a week for months, checking on the teeth of T. rex and skin of Triceratops. I’d sent them dozens of pages on dino-details. The artists were up to date in their raptor knowledge. They knew that deinonychs were the largest, and that no raptor was bulkier than the average adult male human. Just before Jim called, I’d listened to one artist complain that Spielberg had invented a raptor that didn’t exist. Apparently Spielberg wasn’t happy with the small size of ‘real’ raptors – he wanted something bigger for his movie. He wanted a raptor twice as big as Deinonychus. I’d tried to calm the artist’s misgivings. ‘You know, evolution can change size real fast. It’s not impossible that a giant raptor could evolve in a geological instant. So maybe, theoretically, Spielberg’s oversize raptor could have happened.’ The artist wasn’t impressed with my learned argument. He wanted hard facts, fossil data. ‘Yeah, a giant raptor’s possible – theoretically. But you don’t have any bones.’ But now Jim’s Utahraptor gave him the bones. The fossil beast from Utah turned out to be almost exactly the same size as the biggest raptor in the movie, an animal referred to in the script as the ‘big female’.” (Bakker 1995, p. 3-4.)

We see here that the decision for the upscaling of the raptors’ sizes was made by Spielberg before anyone in the movie’s production had heard of Utahraptor, that the largest dromaeosaur known to them was Deinonychus and that the former’s discovery at best served as a confirmation/justification for the artistic license, not as an inspiration. This is further supported by a famous quote from Stan Winston: “We built it and they discovered it. That still boggles my mind.” While the discovery of Utahraptor was a fantastic coincidence that acted almost like a publicitiy-stunt for the movie (originally the holotype species was even going to be called Utahraptor spielbergi instead of ostrommaysum), the JP raptors are very likely not meant to be Utahraptor for the stated reasons. Not to mention the fact that we now know that Utahraptor was actually quite a bit larger than the JP raptors and a lot more robustly built, almost resembling a mini-‘carnosaur’.

Fig. 6: Deinonychus as it appears in the officially licensed tie-in-game Jurassic World Evolution. Compare with fig. 2. As you can see, in order to differentiate it as much as possible from the franchise’s Velociraptor (itself based on 90s reconstructions of Deinonychus), they made it look like the original Robert Bakker reconstruction from the late 60s and gave it the frills and crests of a basilisk lizard. In my opinion, the better option to make it different would have just been to give it feathers. But hey, I guess if you cannot go forward, you might as well just go even more backwards.

The idea that Jurassic Park takes place in an alternate universe where Deinonychus is classified as a species of Velociraptor and that thus the raptors we see in the movies are actually (artificially oversized) Deinonychus makes sense as long as we just look at the original movies. This has even been a common head-canon among the fanbase for a long time. 2015’s Jurassic World and its accompanying material have however thrown a wrench into that concept. In the movie we can glimpse for a moment at the selection-screen of the hologram display in the Innovation Center and see that it lists Deinonychus and Velociraptor as two different genera (with Velociraptor having its typical JP silhouette). Another image posted on the Dinosaur Protection Group website, created to promote the sequel Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, also shows a list of the animals cloned for the park and Deinonychus and Velociraptor are again listed as separate. We never see Deinonychus in the movies (in fact the DPG list implies that it has fallen back into extinction after the events of JW), but it does prominently appear in the accompanying zoo-simulation game Jurassic World Evolution. Here it looks radically different from the JP Velociraptor, not only being smaller but also resembling the original 1969 reconstruction by Robert Bakker, though bizarrely adorned with a crest and fin along the head and tail meant to make it resemble a basilisk lizard (which when you really think about it is a slap in the face of the dinosaur’s importance to paleontological history, as it was the animal that destroyed the idea of dinosaurs just being big lizards and it revived the bird-dinosaur link). From the same game we have a little tidbit of information on the Velociraptor (fig. 7) which clearly states that the InGen geneticists have accidentally recreated the dinosaur much larger than its real-life counterpart. In the game you can find the dinosaur’s fossils in the Iren Dabasu and Flaming Cliffs Formation (the same by the way goes for the game’s predecessor Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis from 2001), again not the Bayan Shireh Formation where Achillobator is found. This implies that the classic JP raptors really are meant to be Velociraptor mongoliensis, the turkey-sized, feathered ground-hawk, but have been unintentionally genetically altered to the point where they do not resemble their originals anymore at all. This would actually fit with some lore pieces which state that Velociraptor was one of the first, if not the first dinosaur recreated by InGen, meaning it likely still had a lot of genetic kinks that needed to be worked out. Of course, this version of events may just pertain to the canon of the game (which does play in one or more continuities different from the main movies), though together with the information on the DPG website, the holoscape seen in the actual movie, and the fact that the developers closely worked with Universal and the production teams of the movies, this really does seem to be the explanation used behind the scenes and which we might regard as canon…

Fig. 7: You would think that after being the cause for so many deaths, the park’s geneticists would finally fix the genome and make the animal smaller. Does Joe Exotic happen to work for InGen?

…if it were not for one major problem: In the first movie Dr. Grant digs up a fossil, which looks exactly like the JP raptors and which he definitely classifies as Velociraptor, IN MONTANA. If the JP raptors are really meant to be overgrown Velociraptor mongoliensis and Deinonychus exists in this universe as its own separate genus, then this makes absolutely no sense. Perhaps Alan Grant really is just a Jack Horner/Greg Paul-type eccentric who personally classifies Deinonychus as a species of Velociraptor and goes against general consensus, but this idea quickly becomes unfeasible if we take into account that both the InGen staff and Tim Murphy independently from him also classify the raptors in the movie as Velociraptor, not Deinonychus. Assuming that, somewhen between Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World, Deinonychus was recognized as a separate genus in the film’s universe also does not help, as the raptors we assume to be misclassified Deinonychus are still called Velociraptor by everyone in the newer movies. Retconning the classic JP raptors from being V. antirrhopus to actually being V. mongoliensis would create a continuity problem which could not simply be explained through frog-DNA. The same goes by the way for the novel. For my own brain’s wellbeing I will therefore still maintain that in the Jurassic Park universe Deinonychus is classified as Velociraptor antirrhopus and that the raptors we see in the movies are this species, albeit heavily modified through genetic engineering. Apart from a very quick and easy to miss detail in Jurassic World, any evidence that Deinonychus exists as its own genus in the JP universe comes from extended material like videogames and websites, which are regarded as soft-canon at best, and can therefore be easily dismissed if one wishes to do so.

[Update from July 2021: The marketing campaign for Jurassic World: Dominion is now in full swing. Apart from some pleasant surprises (feathered dinosaurs!) it was also announced that a pack of Deinonychus would make an appearance in the movie, probably because semi-tamed Blue is the only living Velociraptor left in the world but they realized they still needed some villainous raptor-pack to chase the protagonists. Not only are they presented as a distinct genus from Velociraptor but also differ from the game's pre-established design, looking far more generically like they are from the 90s. However, because they probably realized how many headaches this will cause for the reasons mentioned above, their name has been changed shortly after to Atrociraptor... which, yeah... it is at least friendly to the lore, but the real life Atrociraptor was only marginally larger than Velociraptor, about the size of an average dog. In other words, a movie-dino based off 90s-style reconstructions of Deinonychus is given the name of another, far smaller dromaeosaur because its name sounds cooler. Those who do not learn from their history are doomed to repeat it, I guess.]

Fig. 8: A promotional image from the Dinosaur Protection Group’s website. Deinonychus and Velociraptor are listed as separate genera, with the red marking implying that Deinonychus has fallen back into extinction. Metriacanthosaurus got the shaft too.

As a final discussion point, let us turn to the raptors which appear in Jurassic Park III. These are different from the raptors we see before and after the third movie in many details: Their coloration is different, their heads are more elongated and pointier, they have prominent crests in front of their eyes and the males possess feather-quills on top of their head. Their origin and relationship to the other raptors is never explained in the movie. Out-of-universe their design-change was simply meant to be a sort of retcon, as it had become undeniable by 2001 that dromaeosaurs had feathers (unfortunately this did not translate into the following sequels due to the movie’s unpopularity). The closest thing to an official explanation we got was an interview from John Rosengrant, in which he said that these are the same raptor species as the one we see in the previous films, but they have somehow evolved further in the isolation of Isla Sorna. This, however, seems very unlikely, as evolution does not work like that in a span of just four years. Given how this movie establishes that InGen has created dinosaur species which were not officially listed in their documents, such as Spinosaurus, and that it plays in the previously unseen Northern part of Isla Sorna, it becomes tempting to speculate that these raptors might be a different species than the ones we see in the other movies. Could this be Jurassic Park’s version of Utahraptor or Achillobator? While that would be a cool explanation, there are a couple of things going against it. Firstly, in the in-universe InGen leaks on the DPG website, no new dromaeosaur species is listed among the dinosaurs which Dr. Henry Wu illegally created on Isla Sorna between the second and fourth movie. It is just Spinosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Corythosaurus and Ankylosaurus. The best thing we have is this internal memo by Wu, which can be found on the Masrani backdoor website (again created to promote Jurassic World):

“RUFFLED FEATHERS

---BEGIN LOG---

OWNER: WU, HENRY

DATE: 02/20/2003 1410 CST

SUBJECT: RUFFLED FEATHERS

NOTES: I'M CALLING THIS THE 'COMMON COLD OF GENETICS'. WE CAN'T CURE THIS ONE SOON I'M SURE. BECAUSE WE'RE ACTIVELY MANIPULATING AND MUTATING THE ANIMALS' GENES, ADDING FROG, BIRD AND REPTILE DNA, WE CREATE WHAT IS KNOWN AS 'NULL ALLELE'. THE DINOSAURS CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT SOMETHING ADDED TO THEIR CODE SO FOR NOW WE'RE STUCK WITH SCALES. MAYBE MY RESEARCH INTO GENE SPLICING WILL UNEARTH THIS PROBLEM, IT CERTAINLY PROVED ITS LIMITLESS CAPABILITIES WITH THAT ACCIDENT WE LEFT ON SORNA.”

This is ambiguous enough to interpret that the raptors we see in Jurassic Park III are a failed experiment by Wu to faithfully recreate dinosaurs with feathers, explaining the sparse quills on their heads, but the wording strongly implies that his efforts to make feathered dinosaurs and his gene-splicing tests on Sorna are two different things. That makes it far more likely that what is meant with the “accident” on Sorna is in fact the Spinosaurus, which due to its numerous inaccuracies and ridiculous capabilities is now often regarded as an early experiment by Wu into dinosaur-hybridisation. While it is still possible that the quilled raptors were created by Wu during his illegal cloning adventures on Isla Sorna, there is no in-universe documentation of this. They could just as well have been made by InGen back in the early 90s when Jurassic Park and the facilities on Sorna were still operational. In either case, it seems the most likely that they were genetically altered/improved versions of the previous raptors, not a new species. If they were created when Jurassic Park was still operational it is possible that they were even meant to eventually replace the 93’ variant before Sorna was abandoned, as they not only seem a lot more intelligent, but are also at least somewhat cooperative and less hostile to humans, as we can see by the ending of JPIII. The idea to genetically alter the dinosaurs to be more docile and continually replace them with “updated” versions is something mentioned in the franchise as early as the first novel. The semblance of feather-like structures on their bodies could also imply that their DNA is somewhat more authentic to the real animal than in the previous variants. The idea that they are essentially the same species as the other raptors is also supported by the ending, in which Grant manages to communicate with the raptors by using a 3D-printed resonance-chamber, which he scanned from a “Velociraptor” he dug up again in North America. The quilled raptors are therefore most likely also meant to be Deinonychus/Velociraptor antirrhopus, just a genetically more (or less) altered variant than the other ones we see.

Fig. 9: May the real Deinonychus please stand up?

Long story short, while the real-life Velociraptor mongoliensis is a fascinating and cool animal in its own right (as is really any dinosaur to be honest), because of Jurassic Park it has been stealing the limelight from Deinonychus for nearly three decades now. This was not helped much by speculations that these movie raptors are actually Utahraptor or Achillobator, the confused mess of a lore that has been created by spin-off material and the movies’ own disabilities to properly explain what their raptors actually are. I somehow suspect that we will never get a real confirmation that the raptors are actually Velociraptor antirrhopus/Deinonychus in the movie canon, as most modern audiences, especially younger ones, will have no idea about the weird history of 1980s paleontology that led to this bizarre chimaera of a film-creature, so it is best left vague as to not open up too many questions. As we have seen, there have even been mild attempts at retconning their original identity, though these would create even bigger problems to explain. Without any real confirmation probably ever coming out, I just want to stress here at the end that this post is just my personal (though hopefully well-argued) theory and you are free to speculate about the identity of the JP raptors all you want. And hey, lately there have been rumours that the upcoming third film of the new trilogy, Jurassic World: Dominion, will feature not only new but also a lot more scientifically accurate dinosaurs, likely produced by rival genetics companies. Perhaps this will be the time to shine for Utahraptor and Achillobator, hopefully with feathers that will make them look like giant, toothed harpy eagles. 

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Related Posts:

• The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 1 - Antediluvia
• The Alien Prehistoric World Trope: Part 5 - Renaissance Madness

Literary Sources:

• Bakker, Robert: Raptor Red, New York 1995.
• Crichton, Michael: Jurassic Park, New York 1990 (2015 reprint).
• Paul, Gregory Scott: Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. A Complete Illustrated Guide, New York 1988.
• Schalansky, Judith: Die Verlorenen Welten des Zdeněk Burian, Berlin 2013 (Naturkunden 8).

Papers:

• Ostrom John: Osteology of Deinonychus antirrhopus, an Unusual Theropod from the Lower Cretaceous of Montana, Yale University 1969.
• Frederickson et al.: Ontogenetic dietary shifts in Deinonychus antirrhopus (Theropoda; Dromaeosauridae): Insights into the ecology and social behavior of raptorial dinosaurs through stable isotope analysis, 2020.

Online Sources/Further Reading:

• Realistic raptors: pop-culture dromaeosaurs vs current science, part 1 by Mark Witton
• Yale's Legacy in Jurassic World by Yale News
• The Achilles Heel: Why the Jurassic Park Novel Raptors are Not Achillobator
• Dinosaur Protection Group
• Masrani Global (typing in the keyword “Indominus” in the Terminal will allow you to access the backdoor with all the leaked internal mails)

Image Sources:

• Fig. 1: Schalansky 2013, p. 53.
• Fig. 2: Ostrom 1969.
• Fig. 3: Paul 1988, cover.
• Fig. 4: Paul 1988, p. 172.
• Fig. 5: Paul 1988, p. 367.
• Fig. 6-7, 9: Jurassic World Evolution, developed by Frontier, copyright Universal. Images taken by me using the Playstation 4's capture mode.
• Fig. 8: The DPG website