Velociraptor

Hello! My name is Velociraptor, which means 'swift seizer.' I bet when you hear my name, you picture a giant, scaly dinosaur from the movies, but I have a surprise for you. I wasn't big at all. I was actually about the size of a big turkey. And I wasn't scaly, either. I was covered in fluffy feathers, just like many of my dinosaur cousins. My feathers mean I am related to the birds you see today. I hatched from a tiny egg a very, very long time ago, during a time called the Late Cretaceous Period. It was an exciting world to be born into, full of amazing creatures and big adventures waiting for a little dinosaur like me.

My home was a warm, sandy desert with tall dunes that stretched as far as my eyes could see. Today, you call this place the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. I was a fantastic hunter, and I had a secret weapon that made me extra good at it. On each of my feet, I had a big, sharp, curved claw that was shaped like a sickle. It was the perfect tool for catching my dinner. I had to be quick and clever to survive. One of the most famous fossils ever found shows just how fierce we could be. It's called the 'Fighting Dinosaurs' fossil, and it shows one of my relatives locked in a battle with a plant-eater called a Protoceratops. It proves that even though we were small, we were very brave hunters.

After all the dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth, my bones and the bones of my family were hidden deep under the desert sand for millions of years. For a very long time, nobody knew that dinosaurs like me had ever existed. It was like we were a secret hidden from the world. But then, on August 11th, 1923, a team of human explorers digging in the sand found something amazing. They found the very first fossil of me. It was a skull and one of my special sickle claws. The next year, in 1924, a scientist named Henry Fairfield Osborn gave me my official name, Velociraptor, and the world started to learn my story.

I lived in the Late Cretaceous Period. Even though I don't run through the desert anymore, my fossils help scientists understand what the world was like back then. They show that dinosaurs were amazing creatures and that some of us, with our feathers, were the ancient relatives of the birds you see flying in your backyard. My story helps prove that birds are living dinosaurs. So the next time you see a bird hopping on the grass or flying in the sky, you can remember me, the swift, feathery dinosaur from long ago.