Velociraptor lived in what’s now Mongolia about 75 million years ago - and if you met one alive, you’d be very surprised. The famous movie raptors are roughly 6 feet tall. A real Velociraptor was about 6 feet long nose to tail-tip, and only about a foot and a half tall at the hip. About the size of a wild turkey.
It was still a serious predator: fast, smart for a dinosaur, and equipped with a long curved “sickle claw” on each foot that it held up off the ground while running, then jammed into prey when it pounced.
But the famous movie design - tall, leathery, dog-sized - is actually based on a bigger cousin called Deinonychus. The filmmakers borrowed the name “Velociraptor” because it sounded more dramatic.
