A resident of Palm Coast, Florida, caught an unusual-looking animal on her security camera and jokingly told her local TV station that it looked like a "raptor," (short for "velociraptor," a type of dinosaur that flourished around 75 million years ago), sparking a number of headlines to that effect.
"Woman says she filmed a ‘velociraptor’ running through her backyard," a British news outlet's headline reported. The story also prompted a tongue-in-cheek tweet by Universal Orlando Resort, which has a "Jurassic Park" attraction.
It doesn't appear that the woman who caught the footage, Cristina Ryan, seriously meant that she had a velociraptor on camera, however. She spoke to Orlando, Florida-based news station WOFL on April 18, 2021, and stated:
"Any animal we can come up with that would be 'walking' at 3:40 in the morning, wouldn't walk this way. Maybe I've watched 'Jurassic Park' too many times, but I see a raptor or other small dinosaur!"
Ryan said the footage was captured during the week prior to her comments to WOFL at 3:40 a.m.
The footage is grainy, and it's hard to tell for sure, but what appears on her camera to us looks like it might be a dog:
We will update this story if we are able to get a definitive answer as to what the animal is. Dinosaurs went extinct tens of millions of years ago (except in our collective imaginations) so it's safe to say the animal isn't a velociraptor.