Hello and welcome to the Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we review different facets

of the Human-centered planet on a five-star scale.

I'm John Green, and today I'll be reviewing Velociraptors and the 1950 American Film

Harvey.

But let's begin with Velociraptors, which were not particularly famous dinosaurs until

1990 when Michael Crighton's novel Jurassic Park was published.

The novel about a theme park containing dinosaurs created from cloned DNA samples became a runaway

bestseller, and then three years later Stephen Spielberg's film adaptation brought the

novel's dinosaurs to awe-inspiring life with computer-generated animations, the likes of

which moviegoers had never seen before.

Within 25 years later, Jurassic Park's dinosaurs still look astonishingly lifelike, including

the Velociraptors, which are portrayed as scaly creatures about six feet in height from

present-day Montana.

Crighton's Velociraptors are the kind of terrifying and intimidating animal you might want to

name say a professional sports franchise after, and indeed when the National Basketball

Association expanded into Canada in 1995, Toronto chose as its team name the Raptors.

Today, the Velociraptor stands alongside T. Racks and Stegosaurus as among the best-known

dinosaurs, even though the actual creatures that lived in the late Cretaceous period

some 70 million years ago have very little in common with the Velociraptors of our contemporary

imagination.

For starters, Velociraptors did not live in what is now Montana, they lived in what is

now Mongolia and China, and while they were smart for dinosaurs, they were not smarter than

...