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« "Look how smart they are. They're watching us as much as we're watching them." »
Nick Cutter[src]


Troodon is an intelligent, fierce, and deadly Deinonychosaur dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous.

Facts[]

Troodon was a relatively small dinosaur, with the largest recorded specimens growing to around 2.4 metres in length, 1.2 metres tall, and weighing up to 50 kilograms. However, they had a very large brain for their body size. Troodons walk on two legs, like other theropods. They have long legs, adapted for running quickly, and relatively short arms. Troodon has a long, stiff tail, to help it balance, while it was running. Troodon's eyes were huge, and it had very good eyesight. It was a nocturnal hunter, using its acute senses of vision and hearing to hunt for its prey, at night.

Like other raptors, Troodon had a sharp, retractable sickle-shaped claw on the second toe of each of its hind feet. It used this claw to slash at its prey. Troodons hunted in packs, like modern-day wolves or lions, overwhelming larger prey. Their fossils have been found in North America and Asia. Troodon was very bird-like. In fact, it even had feathers, just like modern-day birds. Troodon lived during the Late Cretaceous period, from approximately 85 to 65 million years, ago.

In Extinction Event, the Troodons are portrayed as vicious predators. They look somewhat similar to the Raptors which the team had encountered in Episode 2.1. They are lightly-built and sinuous, with long, whip-like tails. Their eyes are large, and golden in colour. They have dark grey feathers above their eyes, resembling eyebrows.

Incursion and Encounters[]

Extinction Event[]

A pack of six of them attacks and kills Tim Jenkins. Earlier on in the book, Cutter, Abby, and the Russian team see three Troodons feeding on an asphyxiated Anatotitan, which is a result of a meteor strike. Later, they attack the humans again after an angered Ankylosaurus attack the car the humans were in, but are scared away when the car's ruptured fuel tank ignites a fire. It is unknown what happened to the Troodons, afterwards.

Trivia[]

  • Troodon means "Wounding Tooth"
  • Troodon is said to have the biggest brain of any dinosaur and is thought to have been one of the most intelligent, if not the most intelligent, of all dinosaurs.
  • Despite sharing some features with dromaeosaurids, such as an enlarged retractable sickle-shaped claw on each foot, Troodon belonged to a separate family of raptors called the Troodontidae. Troodontids were perhaps even more birdlike than the dromaeosaurids, and were probably smarter.
  • Though usually depicted as a pure carnivore, the leaf-like shape of its teeth suggests that Troodon may have fed on some plant matter as well.
  • A few paleontologists have theorized that if they hadn't been wiped out in the K-T extinction, Troodons may have evolved into humanoid creatures, popularly nicknamed "Dinosauroids".

  

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