Finding any raptor bone is a treat for us bone-diggers. But what Gaston and Kirkland had just identified in their workshop was something so spectacular, no scientist had ever dreamed of it. They had found the first giant raptor.
Their claw was from a beast twice the size of any other member of the family and must have been carried by a body five hundred to a thousand pounds - eight times heavier than a deinonych. It was the find of a lifetime.
The claw we’ve got - it’s huge! I could hear Jim jumping up and down at the other end of the line, and I started jumping up and down too, because I knew something he didn’t. Jim, Jim- Jim! 'I yelled. 'You just found Spielberg’s raptor.
Huh?
You just found the giant raptor Spielberg made up for his movie, you know - Jurassic Park.
Jim thought I was daft. He didn’t know about the other phone call I had gotten about giant raptors that morning. It was from one of the special effects artists working in the Jurassic Park skunk works, the studio where the movie monsters for Spielberg’s film were being fabricated in hush-hush conditions. The artists were suffering secret anxiety about what was to become the star of the movie -a raptor species of a size that had never been documented by a real fossil.