Cast of Velociraptor Skull

This skull is a replica made of resin. It demonstrates one of the ways that museums can fill gaps in their collections.   Velociraptors, (which means 'speedy raider'), are well known from the movie 'Jurassic Park', but were shown as being much larger than they actually were - about 2 metres in length. They lived in the Cretaceous period, about 80 million years ago, and their fossilized remains have been found in rocks in Russia, China and Mongolia.   These small, quick hunters, had fairly large brains, and each foot bore a large retractable claw. They probably hunted in packs and therefore may have been able to tackle prey much larger than themselves. It is commonly believed that the birds around us today evolved from dinosaurs like Velociraptor and that some of the scales of this dinosaur may have evolved into feathers for warmth or display. This development in our understanding of these dinosaurs is so recent that the makers of 'Jurassic Park' had to change the appearance of their 'raptors' between the first and third films to accommodate this.    This skull was cast from an original fossil found in Mongolia and donated to East Ayrshire by the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow.