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About Utahraptor:
Probably the biggest raptor that ever lived, Utahraptor weighed a whopping 1,500 pounds--which may not seem like much, until you remember that Deinonychus (the stand-in for Velociraptor in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park) came in at about 200 pounds, max. As you might have guessed, Utahraptor had correspondingly huge claws, each close to one foot in length (these single claws, one on each foot, were used for slashing and ripping at prey). See a gallery of Utahraptor pictures
Oddly, Utahraptor lived well before its more famous raptor cousins, in the early rather than the late Cretaceous. It's more often the case that a tiny ancestor will give rise to gigantic descendants, but where raptors are concerned, evolution appears to have worked in reverse!
