Are Velociraptor Wrists Birdlike?

“I am an artist and try to draw dinosaurs as accurately as possible, but I am having some trouble with dromaeosaurs, particularly Velociraptor (aka my favorite dinosaur!). . . . I got stuck on how they reconstruct the wrists. . . . Is there any fossil evidence for the wrists being bird-like and sideways? Or do they look more reptilian and hang like Jurassic Park raptors?”

Hi Emma, thanks so much for writing in! You remind me a lot of myself at your age. Velociraptor was my favorite, and I drew many pictures of him. I love that you’re already identifying the evolutionary thinking that goes into many drawings and reconstructions of dinosaurs and extinct animals. It’s so important to stay true to God’s Word and not give in to unbiblical ideas like evolution.

You’re very observant and have actually stumbled onto a very important, and even controversial, topic. I’ve been researching and writing on this topic, so let me give you my take, but these things may change as more research is completed.

When I dove into the actual fossil evidence, I was surprised by the conclusions, and you may be as well. Some dromaeosaurs have been found with birdlike feathers clearly preserved in the fossil. Examples of this are Microraptor and Sinornithosaurus. Velociraptor, however, has not been found with any clear evidence of feathers. So this logically leaves us with one of several conclusions:

1. Dromaeosaurs were feathered dinosaurs (seems least likely)
2. All dromaeosaurs were actually birds (possible, but unlikely for some)
3. Many dromaeosaurs were birds with some exceptions (seems most likely)

The best way to figure out which of the above options is correct is to study the rest of the anatomy of dromaeosaurs. So that’s what we’ve been working on—I actually have a research paper in Answers Research Journal that goes in depth into the anatomy of Microraptor (it’s very technical, but it does have some diagrams that may be helpful to you).1

What I’ve concluded is that many dromaeosaurs share some anatomical features with birds, even beyond the feathers. The two easiest features to see are the tail and the wrist.

• Birds have short, thin tails while dinosaurs have long, thick tails. Dromaeosaur tails are relatively short (30 vertebrae or fewer) and very thin, not thick and muscular like dinosaur tails.
  
• Birds have a special wrist that swivels sideways and allows them to fold their wing against their body. Dinosaurs don’t have wrists like this. Dromaeosaurs appear to have this special swivel wrist, so their arms function more like wings than arms.
  

This aspect of the wrist is what you’ve read about, showing an “accurate” wrist. This is part of dromaeosaur anatomy, and they can tell that because of a special half-moon-shaped bone in the wrist that enables the swivel movement. So it seems that many of the smaller dromaeosaurs, surprisingly, were probably birds! We haven’t found as many bones of many of the larger dromaeosaurs, such as Utahraptor and Dakotaraptor (this is what the Jurassic movies were based on). So those may have been dinosaurs, but we don’t have enough information to tell for sure.

Velociraptor was not as large as shown in the movies—it was actually about the size of a big turkey. They just liked the name, so they used it for the movies. We haven’t found a Velociraptor with feathers, so it’s hard to be conclusive about what it was. I actually have a couple of YouTube videos that can help explain this with visuals:

Thanks so much for writing in! Keep up the good work. I loved your drawings, they were very good!

Keep the faith,
Joel

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Footnotes

1. Joel Leineweber, “Microraptor Reconstructed as a Bird,” Answers Research Journal 17 (May 15, 2024): 217–352, https://answersresearchjournal.org/dinosaurs/microraptor-reconstruction/.