How Did Utahraptor Work?

Mountain West. One of the beasts found there, indeed, one that seems to be totally unique to Grand County, Utah, is the Utah raptor, a carnivorous dinosaur with frightful claws. It lived around one hundred and thirty five million years ago and boasts a few Jurassic Park connections, as the name raptor suggests. Yet, by various estimates, Utah Raptor could grow to be fifteen, eighteen, or perhaps even twenty three feet long. That's from about four and a half to

seven meters. That could make this dino a whole lot bigger than any raptor in Steven Spielberg's filmography. The Utah Raptor was named the state's official dinosaur in twenty eighteen. But this eventual home of the Utah Jazz basketball team and the Great Salt Lake looked very different. When Utah Raptor reigned about one hundred and thirty five million years ago, the Jurassic period of Earth's geologic history was coming to

a close. It was followed by the Cretaceous period, which lasted until a mass extinction event about sixty six million years ago that killed off the last of the dinosaurs except for birds. Utah Raptor lived early in the Cretaceous. At that time, the face of Utah was transforming, thanks in no small part to everyone's favorite pretzel topping salt. Without it, we might not know that utah Raptor ever existed. Okay, along, before even the first dinosaurs showed up, there was a

deep basin along what's now the Utah Colorado Border. Seawater flowed in and as it evaporated, it left behind giant piles of salt that were literally thousands of feet tall that is hundreds and hundreds of meters. A rocky debris later covered up those salt beds. As time passed, the now underground cache of salt started getting deformed by this heavy overlying material. Parts of Utah's terrain were raised up

by the shifting salt, other spots dipped down. Grand County was one of those places where this movement or salt tectonics created big depressions across the landscape, and in the early Cretaceous these became the home of vibrant ponds and lakes.

It was a perfect environment for future fossils. A North America was a fairly dry place in those days, an erosion was rampant, but here the inflow of water and sediment to these low elevation lakes did a good job of covering up and preserving the bodies of the animals that died there, animals like the Utah raptor. The two oldest assemblages of Cretaceous dinosaurs in the entire North American

fossil record are both preserved in Grand County rocks. For the article this episode is based on How Stuff Works, spoke via email with Jim Kirkland, Utah's official state paleontologist. He explained about one hundred and thirty five million years ago, local subsidence in Grand County uniquely preserved a series of lakes and ponds teeming with lungfish, chain mail covered bony fish, and spiny sharks. Utah raptor stocked iguanodonts and young sauropods,

while the heavily spined and armored gastonia looked on. Iguanodonts were beaked animals, Sauropods were long necked giants, and Gastonia was a type of armor plated dinosaur built like a living tank. All of them had vegetarian diets, though flowering plants hadn't developed yet. Most of the vegetation there consisted of conifers and ferns. A utah raptor was the biggest type of raptor, with an estimated weight of about six hundred to eight hundred pounds or two hundred and fifty

to three fifty kilos. They would have been about the size of a large black bear or a small grizzly. As for the infamous velociraptor, it likely weighed in at just eighty five pounds or so about forty kilos. A native of Late Cretaceous Asia, the real velociraptor was a small bodied predator far removed from its Hollywood name sake. The raptors in the Jurassic Park franchise were inspired by larger species, but like all of these relatives, utah raptor

had an outsized, sickle shaped claw on each foot. The animals held these claws upright as they walked. The claws had a core of bone measuring up to eight point seven inches that's twenty two centimeters long, and that's just

the tip of the iceberg. Like modern eagles, utah raptor must have had keratin sheets covering its clawbones, which would have made these weapons even bigger than their naked skeletons suggest a utah raptor's arsenal was rounded out with long claw tipped arms and a mouthful of serrated teeth, all the better for tearing flesh technically. The first utah raptor fossils on record were discovered by paleontologist Jim Jensen of

Brigham Young University in nineteen seventy five. However, and nobody knew quite what to make of these until a team led by Kirkland dug up another set of raptor bones in nineteen ninety one. A utah raptor got its official name when Kirkland and his colleagues published a paper introducing the animal in nineteen ninety three, which fittingly is the

same year that Jurassic Park was stomped into theaters. The creature's full scientific name utah Raptor Ostrom Mazie salutes raptor expert John Ostrom and animatronics creator Chris Mays, who helped the research effort. The scientists did consider calling the dino utah Raptor Spielbergey after a certain movie director, but that never came to pass. Utah Raptor remains are known from

four different localities across Grant County. One of these sites has yielded a nine ton sandstone megablock filled with assorted dinosaur bones. According to researchers, that's probably what's left of a Cretaceous quicksand type pit. Some iguanadont bones are included in the mix, but the real highlight is the raptor material. Kirkland says that the block has yielded fossils from dozens of individual utah raptor, and in a stroke of luck, many of those were babies or juveniles when they died.

That could bring us a few steps closer to understanding how this fearsome predator grew up. Today's episode is based on the article utah Raptor the Salty Saga of a Killer Dinosaur on how stuffworks dot Com, written by Mark Mancini. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For four more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yes