How did velociraptors make their nest?

Advertisement When an adult Velociraptor makes its nest it has two choices in what to build it. It can place a stone, which is fine unless we know what we are facing and how big a stone we can make from it.

Velociraptor and its young mate made nests out of hard earth, which is a lot harder than the hard, wet sandstone of today. The stones have to stay close together, so Velociraptors have to make very little noise to make their call.

Velociraptor also made a nest with more than one egg, because they don't know what they are being watched by their enemies— a bird or whatever it is who's flying overhead. The eggs are also harder to find than the stones, and if they do get lost, like they did to these animals, the family can be lost forever.

Advertisement If they build too many stones, the birds risk being caught by the parents but don't get to start a nest again. Velociraptors had a problem, and the solution was to make their nest on the roof of their den.

These animals needed to build a roof to protect themselves from predators. In some parts of the world, such as Central America, the walls can be as high as 80 feet. Velociraptor lived in a lot of these areas and could build a great roof.

But some people were against building the roof. They believed that, since these arachnids were such good climbers, they wouldn't need to spend so much time in high places. This is an interesting argument to make.

Even if the velociraptors were climbing better than their cousins on their feet, why would it need to make themselves more vulnerable?
Why would it give up its main method of defense in order to protect its own body?
Advertisement The roof would also have to be so low that it couldn't defend itself.

As our home roofs have become so high, the danger of crashing to the ground has become greater than before. It isn't possible for birds to make a perfect roof, however. They have to be relatively tall, because the pressure from the roof is concentrated in one place.

The bigger the roof, the greater the risk there may be of being stuck high in the air. But there are many more practical reasons to let birds make their nests in roofs— they can't climb it. They can't make their nests as high as our houses.

They can't build it as sturdy as ours. And it is too hard to get rid of them with a bulldozer. In fact, the only way to get rid of a young velociraptor is to kill it. Advertisement The birds have their homes, of course, and have learned to co- exist.

They have never killed another Velociraptor. That doesn't mean they don't fight a bit, though. This may be the world's strangest case of violence between two birds, where both avian species are actively seeking a mating partner or, in this case, both are vying for a little food.

Some birds can survive on rocks and other debris that are dropped by human cars, which means that humans could possibly harm birds. Advertisement But there are other ways to save the birds from themselves.

We have built structures that mimic the shape of a Velociraptor's nest, so the birds don't have to climb all this way to find a place. We also found a little tree that might help them hide— and thus to make it less vulnerable to predators.

We found another tree that allowed these animals to climb to the tops of the trees. This is the kind of natural history we have in our backyard, and it's the kind that could have occurred much, much earlier in the history of our species.

Advertisement Of course, we don't have time to wait for those bird- like animals to make their nests.