Review and photographs by Loon, edited by Suspsy. Ornitholestes was a coelurosaur from the Late Jurassic of North America. It most famously appeared in the BBC Walking With Dinosaurs series and featured in the second Jurassic Park book, The Lost World. Its appearance in the latter continued the tried and true Crichton trope of dead dinosaurs washing up on beaches....
There is a line in the play “Arcadia” by Tom Stoppard that I feel encapsulates science, especially palaeontology, brilliantly: “The greatest moment in life is when you find everything you thought was true was wrong.” The number of changes in thoughts about prehistoric life certainly proves this, as with the species I am reviewing here, Ornitholestes. For years it was...
North America during the Late Jurassic was terrorized by a number of large and lethal theropods such as Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, and Torvosaurus. But there were also much some smaller meat eaters roaming around such as Ornitholestes. A mainstay of many of the dinosaur books I read as a child during the 1980s’, it was usually depicted preying on Archaeopteryx—despite the...
