Every once in a while it’s wise to admit you’re wrong and take it all back. That’s why I’ve decided to do away with the Megaraptors. Those, in case you missed them, were the nasty carnivorous dinosaurs that gave Kit Daniels and Chase Armstrong such trouble in the events I chronicled in the first two books of the Dinosaur Wars series.
Yes, the Megaraptors must go. You see, since the days when I wrote down those histories, the hard-working fraternity of paleontologists have dug up some new fossils that make it clear the beasts in question were not native to the North American Continent, never mind the local scene here at Twin Creeks Ranch in Montana.
Heck, the Megaraptors weren’t even members of the clan of maniraptors. Mani-who, you ask? Maniraptors were that line of meat eating dinos that included Velociraptor and a few other beasts with nasty clawed hands for grabbing their prey and even nastier-clawed feet for disemboweling any luckless victim they got their hands on. Click the image for an up-close-and-personal view.
Megaraptors, ten years ago, were hypothesized to be the biggest and nastiest of this group of meat munchers, based on a horrendously huge killing claw and a few other bits and pieces dug up in Argentina. However, some more digging since then has shown that the beast in question was actually a member of another branch of the dinosaur line. It’s sort of like they realized something they’d been calling a tiger was actually a bear.
It’s understandable paleontologists might want to revise such an error and publish new articles showing Megaraptors were members of a different group, but that’s where my problem starts. The new classification of Megaraptors proves they were members of a family of meatasauruses that didn’t even exist in North America. That makes it clear the beasts that pursued Kit and Chase into a crevice were not Megaraptors, but something else that’s about equally mean and nasty. So, what were they then? And how am I to faithfully chronicle these events if I can’t even name the bad guys?
Fortunately, other fossil diggers have come to my rescue. It seems in the ten-year time period in question, Megaraptors were not the only beasts getting their résumés updated. There were some pretty nasty maniraptors on this continent called Utahraptors after the state where their bones were found. Kit and her mentor, Dr. Ogilvey, had passed them over in naming the beasts because the fossils then known were quite a bit smaller than Megaraptor. Well, glory halleluja! Fossil hunters have now turned up some chunks of bone that imply Utahraptors, given half a chance, could grow as big as grizzly bears. That’s big enough to suit Dr. Ogilvey and he’s declared the local beasts to be present-day incarnations of that long ago line of killers.
Now, just to avoid embarrassing Kit Daniels, who reported these creatures to me while describing events that nearly ended her young life, I’ve decided to expunge the record of all mention of Megaraptor. That way paleontologists won’t accuse Kit and Dr. O of spreading misinformation about creatures that nearly had Kit for lunch.
