Real life velociraptors were tiny and pathetic

I don’t have thoughts. I’m quite stupid, really.

'Raptor' sounds cool.

It should've been Deinonychus but they used Raptor for creative license (which was a good choice).

He took creative license to make big raptors. Ironically just about when the movie was released, paleontologists actually discovered a species of Raptor that stood about six foot tall.

And just recently they discovered an even larger species.

It's true. Fossil records show that real velociraptors were the size of small dogs, and even had feathers! However, the latter part of that wasn't discovered until the late 2000s, so at the time of the 1990s, scientists didn't actually know that.

I read why the movie-makers used larger raptors than what fossil records indicated. It was to create a secondary danger to the T-rex, as well as add to the action in the film. They used a combination of mock-ups, actors in partial costumes, and CGI for the raptor scenes, particularly in the kitchen stalking scene.

I'm not certain what the deal was with Crichton, though I actually have not read his book, and I heard it was different than the film that came out. The least he could have done was write somewhere that some idiot scientist decided to genetically manipulate the velociraptors to make them larger and more interesting for the park. That would have made sense, considering they already were engineering the animals to all be female, and made the mistake of using the DNA of African frogs that could change their sex if need be.