侏羅紀搏擊俱樂部 第123期:猶他盜龍奇特的爪子

We have been working in the quarries, and we were starting to get familiar with how the bones were situated.

我們在石場工作，我們開始對骨頭是如何放置的熟悉起來。

And one of the students that was with the College of Eastern Utah, yelled over to me:

在東猶他大學就讀的一名學生向我喊道：

"Jim, you should come over and look at this. It looks a little different."

“吉姆，你得過來看看這個。看起來有點兒不一樣”

And I'm looking down at it, and I realize that there's a little groove on the surface.

我向下看去，意識到在其表面有一條小溝槽。

And I hold my head down low and realize "Boy, this is really thin. That looks like the groove you see in the side of a claw,but it's really thin."

把頭低下去后發(fā)現“天哪，這真薄?？雌饋砗孟袷亲ψ觽让娴臏喜郏贿^真是很薄。”

And I thought to myself, "Deinonychus, terrible claw, from the early Cretaceous."

我想，“恐爪龍，可怕的爪子，來自白堊紀早期。”

"This is good, one of my favorite dinosaurs." I said, "This is twice as big as Deinonychus".

“不錯，是我最喜歡的恐龍之一”，我說，“但這有恐爪龍兩倍大”。

Scientists had just unearthed the remains of a giant raptor, one that was over 12 times as heavy as its next largest relative.

科學家們剛剛挖出了巨大的迅猛龍骨骸，是其最大親戚體重的十二倍。

They named the beast Utahraptor.

他們給這頭猛獸起名猶他盜龍。

Very soon after beginning to excavate the Gastonia bones, we uncovered a claw approximately 8 inches in length.

我們挖掘出加斯頓龍骨頭之后很快，我們就發(fā)現了一個接近8英寸長的爪子。

And through analysis of other specimens, it was determined that this was a gigantic Dromaeosaur, which is the family of dinosaurs that Velociraptor and Deinonychus and things like that belong to.

通過分析其它樣本，它被確定是一種巨大的恐爪龍，伶盜龍和鱷龍以及類似這些都屬于的這個恐龍科。

And so this was very exciting because it was the largest Dromaeosaur known and not only it was larger than anything known, but it was several times larger than anything previously seen.

所以這很讓人興奮因為這是已知最大的恐爪龍，不僅比任何已知的都大，而且要比以前看到的大好幾倍。

The Utahraptor preceded the Velociraptor by tens of millions of years.

猶他盜龍比伶盜龍早出現幾千萬年。

This was clearly an early version of the smaller, faster raptors to come.

這顯然是后來的更小更快的迅猛龍的早期版本。

When Utahraptor was found, it was pretty significant because up until that point the largest of the Raptor dinosaurs found was Deinonychus, which was about the size of a timber wolf.

猶他盜龍被發(fā)現的時候，非常有意義，因為到那時為止，人們發(fā)現的最大迅猛龍是鱷龍，其體型與一頭灰狼相仿。

And here comes one with similar sort of anatomy, but bigger than a bear, or at least the size about a big grizzly, or a big polar bear, a truly monster sized Raptor dinosaur.

而這一頭有著類似的解剖結構，但卻比熊大，或者最少是一頭大個兒棕熊或大北極熊的體型，真正的怪獸級別的迅猛龍。

I think someone gave a really good explanation of what Utahraptor was.

我記得有人對猶他盜龍是什么做了非常好的解釋。

Utahraptor was Velociraptor on steroids. Here's the pumped up Raptor.

猶他盜龍是服了類固醇的伶盜龍。這是振奮的迅猛龍。

This is the biggest Raptor we've found so far and it was probably the nastiest as well.

這是到目前為止發(fā)現的最大的迅猛龍，而且很可能是最兇狠的。