#donnie does not deserve to be this worried over man-eating dinosaurs but i love him too <3

[purpleturtle9000]

*slowly edges in under your door like a piece of wayward paper*

Hiiii today I come with gifts of dino stickers (and Clever Girl questions/comments bc I FINALLY beat my adhd into submission to read it >:3) (also I don’t know jackshit about bayverse so my apologies for any goofs)

What made you choose raptors? Also I love horse raptor girl Raph and would kill for him he’s good boy and deserves to keep his buddies

I am choosing to believe they didn’t like Casey bc Acab they can smell the cop on him XD

Were the raptors genetically modified in any way? Cus they seem incredibly intelligent, although that could just be the training and their natural state bc bird Smort af

Okay I think that’s all I got (for now) but also if there’s anything I didn’t ask that you wanna ramble about PLEASE DO I am in love with the Dino’s and their turtle friends :3

*flutters off in a breeze*

I will be putting stickers everywhere immediately, thank you!

I choose raptors because they were my favourite in Jurassic Park from the very beginning. Also I've had a Utahraptor OC for nearly a decade, and Raptor Red is one of my favourite books. So when the idea came of a dinosaur fic, there was truly no question in my mind that it was going to be raptors instead of anything else.

Also anything bigger than Utahraptor would have been an absolute nightmare, logistically speaking. It would take a lot more work to feed, be harder to house, might not have fit on the plane in the first place, and that's even without accounting for there being four of them. Having some big dino like Rexy would be all fun and games until she realises she can fit a whole ninja turtle in her mouth!

Raptor girl Raph is an absolute delight and I support him and Sierra in all their nonsense. (Donnie doesn't, because he's the only one with any real sense, but tbh that's his problem and I have nothing to do with it.) They're going to have a great time terrorising the local bad guys, and probably also the local wildlife.

Casey being a cop is such a stupid decision in Bayverse, it's like the only thing that really gets me 😒 The girls can smell the ACAB now lmao, new canon developing right here. Also Casey is a stranger, and they've always been territorial. Plus Raph is kinda passive-aggressive at Casey and Sierra picks up on that as regular aggression (and by extension, so do the rest of the girls).

The raptors were not modified! They are very smart though, cause bird is Smort af. Parrots can do shit you would not expect from an adult and I love them for it but also sometimes stop that you over-intelligent little shits! Also they have been trained pretty much their entire lives, so they have a baseline for human interaction that can also be applied to turtles.

Also part of their intelligence is based on observations of crocodiles in captivity! Cause they're smarter than you would expect, I got a bunch of books to try to research their behaviour, and I have a whole new appreciation for them.

Okay so obviously there's a lot of things to love in the fic itself, but I also really loved writing the care guide. At first it was just going to be a reference doc for myself, but then I decided to write it as a kind of 'in-universe' thing, from Donnie's POV.

About 90% of the raptor lore is based on what's been observed (and published) about birds of prey and crocodilians. Besides the physical stuff, which is based on fossil records (and some assumptions based on fossil records). Side note, why is it so hard to access some of the academic papers? Let me read!

And a few of my favourite lines from the lore doc:

Sierra shows the same body language when biting the top of Raph’s shell as she does when playing with her sisters. She seems to consider this a form of play as well, and for reasons beyond my comprehension, Raph agrees with her.

The vast majority of aggressive behaviour happens in fights over food, or in an attempt to frighten away things that frighten them. Such things include a loose dog, a butterfly, a plastic bag, and a smoking car engine (the latter also frightened Leo and Mikey).

I have never seen nest squabbles turn violent, unlike our most recent fight for the tv remote.

As shown by Raph and Sierra, to my and Leo’s displeasure, a raptor can pick a meatball from an open palm without injuring the palm.

Raph insists Sierra would attempt to predate a moose if she saw one, as she is, to quote him, ‘braver than Vin Diesel’. I hope he is wrong about her behaviour but assume he is not.

When Raph suggested providing them with a live lobster for enrichment, it locked its claws onto Tango’s lower leg and now all four regard lobsters with suspicion and occasional alarm calls.

Quebec in particular loves liver and will knock Leo over if he’s holding a sheep liver, a habit I have fortunately been able to record for further evaluation.

#raph deserves to be able to be unhinged about something cause i love him <3 #donnie does not deserve to be this worried over man-eating dinosaurs but i love him too <3 #fic: clever girl