See What Jurassic Park’s Raptors Would Look Like With Feathers

Cue the John Williams-scored theme song because we’re heading back to Jurassic Park to give a certain carnivorous dinosaur a realistic—and somehow even more terrifying—update.

Recently, a video made by YouTuber and special effects whiz CoolioArt went viral for reimagining the velociraptors that terrorized Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi blockbuster. The artist took two recognizable scenes from the original 1993 film that feature the clever, vicious pack hunters cornering their human prey and transformed the animals based on our current scientific understanding of what they actually looked like in the Cretaceous period. 

The result? Feathered tails, bird-like appendages, and the general impression that velociraptors, while incredibly dangerous and certainly odd-looking, resembled something closer to a bloodthirsty turkey than the 6-foot beasts that stalked Sam Neill and company on screen. (Our apologies to the bratty kid from Dr. Alan Grant’s dig site. You were right all along.)

CoolioArt was quick to point out that the dinosaurs featured in the film weren’t technically velociraptors. “The animal depicted in this remake is not a velociraptor,” they wrote in the description under the video. “They’re an oversized Deinonychus Antirrhopus, as was the case in the books and original film, just incorrectly lumped into the genus Velociraptor. The real Deinonychus Antirrhopus was about half the size of these guys on average, definitely still able to kill a human though!”

There are a couple of reasons why Spielberg and his team made some adjustments to one of the film’s most famous predators. While velociraptors were skilled hunters, they only measured around 2 feet tall, which would’ve made them arguably less threatening to the group of humans they chased around the park in the original film. And while experts agree today that velociraptors had feathers, that wasn’t the scientific consensus 30 years ago. In 1998, five years after the movie’s release, paleontologists unearthed the first velociraptor forearm with quill knobs, which indicated the species sported prominent arm feathers. Prior to that, scaly, more reptilian depictions like those seen in Jurassic Park didn’t necessarily contradict the fossil evidence available at the time.

The franchise did hint at the possibility that dinosaurs shared some characteristics with their plumy descendants though, with references made by Neill’s character, Dr. Grant, in the first film and visual changes to the velociraptor in later installments that made an attempt at adding a few feathers to the animals. Ultimately though, any inconsistencies and inaccuracies were explained away in the 2015 reboot Jurassic World using the power of storytelling (i.e. genetic cloning isn’t perfect and neither are the dinosaurs in their on-screen universe). 

After seeing CoolioArt’s realistic renderings, maybe that’s a good thing? Scales and hooked claws are scary, but there’s something downright disturbing about seeing an overgrown lizard with wings and a feathered tail. It’s the kind of evolutionary glitch in the matrix that will give you nightmares.

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