Some thoughts on the Raptor archtype

Guess who?

And me too...

Ah, the Jurassic Park-style Raptor. What hasn't been written about it? Scaly skin, slit eyes, pronated hands, it's all but certain based on the fossil record that its nothing like the real dromaeosaurs. And yet even next to 35 years after Jurassic Park, and decades on from the Dinosaur Renaiscance, it persists in pop culture, from video gamrs, all the sway to being stripmined by AI scraping.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I regard Raptor as the Modern era's equivelent of the dragon (or at least the western kind).

First, there came accounts of a real reptilian creature being observed and described. Dragons have a basis in europeans and middle easterners' descriptions of crocodilians and snakes, plus existing myths of serpents. Meanwhile, the dromaeosaurs were reconstructed as scaley and with pronated hands, becauase that's what palaeontologists and artists thought at the time, plus absorbing the "reptiles are lower and evil" that has permeated western culture and abrahamic faiths.

Second, as the real thing is better understood, the mythical creatue begins to diverge, often by people putting elements like from other animals. Dragons in the miedval and early modern era took elements from big cats and other mammals, while dromaeosaurs would gain traits of squamates from the 70s to 90s, and in Velociraptor's case, be synomised with Deinonychus by Paul and thus gain attributes from it (boxy head).

Finally comes full divergence: in the 1990s onward to 2010s, Fossil finds prove the suspicion raptors had feathers, but with Jurassic Park and cultural inertia, the scaley monstrous raptor trope persists, namel the oversized Velociraptor. Raptors only have the most basic shape as dromaeosaurs, just as most dragons in the modern era only have a few attributes of crocs and snakes these days. They exist independant of each other, though with Raptors and dromaosaurs they're a bit closer.... okay they're technically the same, but still.

In short, the Raptor (and perhaps all Retrosaurs) should be treated as seperate, wholly original creature archtypes as opposed to dinosaurs.