© Fred Wierum
Artistic restoration of Deinonychus antirrhopus by Fred Wierum, 2017
Turns out, you really can't believe everything you see in the movies.
A new University of Wisconsin Oshkosh analysis of raptor teeth published in the peer-reviewed journal
Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology shows that
Velociraptors and their kin
likely did not hunt in big, coordinated packs like dogs.
The raptors (
Deinonychus antirrhopus) with their sickle-shaped talons were made famous in the 1993 blockbuster movie
Jurassic Park, which portrayed them as highly intelligent, apex predators that worked in groups to hunt large prey.
"Raptorial dinosaurs often are shown as hunting in packs similar to wolves," said Joseph Frederickson, a vertebrate paleontologist and director of the Weis Earth Science Museum on the UWO Fox Cities campus. "The evidence for this behavior, however, is not altogether convincing. Since we can't watch these dinosaurs hunt in person, we must use indirect methods to determine their behavior in life."
Frederickson led the study in partnership with two colleagues at the University of Oklahoma and Sam Noble Museum, Michael Engel and Richard Cifell.
Though widely accepted, evidence for the pack-hunting dinosaur proposed by the late famed Yale University paleontologist John Ostrom is relatively weak, Frederickson said.
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