The book is a third-person account of dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Period, told from the point of view of Raptor Red, a female Utahraptor.

The book follows a year in Raptor Red's life as she loses her mate, finds her family, and struggles to survive in a hostile environment.

Some scientists, such as paleontologist David B. Norman, took issue with the scientific theories portrayed in the novel, fearing that the public would accept them as fact, while Discovery Channel host Jay Ingram and others defended Bakker's creative decisions as provoking debate and bringing science to a wider audience.

Paleontologist Robert T. Bakker was motivated to write Raptor Red by his interest in dinosaur behavior and his desire to marry science and entertainment, saying that, "nature is a drama.

"[1] He credited the turn-of-the-century naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton's works that focused on life from the perspectives of grizzly bears and wolves as having inspired him to write the novel from the dinosaur's point of view.

Bakker was at the time consulting with the designers of the Jurassic Park film, whose largest portrayed Velociraptor—called the "big female" in the script—was coincidentally the same size as the newly discovered specimen.

[6] Coverage of the event noted that both novels were on the trailing end of the dinosaur fad fueled by Jurassic Park, as the new trend in American books was shifting toward politics in the aftermath of the 1994 US elections.

[7] Raptor Red was initially published as a mass-market paperback and hardcover book, and was later released as an audiobook by Simon & Schuster Audio, read by Megan Gallagher.

[2]: 19  Bakker gives an individual view of each species of dinosaur or ancient creature in the same style as Red's experiences; these include a baby Gastonia who instinctively attacks what it does not understand with its clubbed tail, and a whip-tailed diplodocid who enjoys beating up predators.

One day the raptors encounter a strange creature they have never seen—a whip-tailed diplodocid who inflicts wounds on Red and her sister; the older chick is forced to set off alone and find the pack's food.

The Deinonychus close in but are driven back by the sudden arrival of the older Utahraptor chick and Red's consort, who defend the nest.

[13] Doctor Patricia E. Chu classified Raptor Red as a cinematic and modern "animal story" in the vein of previous works such as Jack London's White Fang.

[18] James Gorman, writing for Natural History, compared Bakker's heroine to a "bloody-minded Jane Austen character—bound by family ties, thoroughly responsible, yet longing for independence and love.

[13] While the Library Journal's review praised Bakker's sympathetic characterization for never becoming cartoonish,[15] other critics felt that the anthropomorphizing of the dinosaurs veered too far into exaggeration.

[18][19][22] Billboard praised Megan Gallagher's narration of the audiobook, with its continuous sound effects and dramatic music to creating an "aural picture".

[24] The paleontologist Thomas Holtz noted that Bakker combined fauna in ways not directly supported by the fossil record; for example, several of the dinosaurs featured in the books lived millions of years after Utahraptor died out.

The merging of science and fantasy is at its worst in books like Raptor Red because none but the experts can disentangle fact from fiction; this type of nonsense turns an uninformed reader into a misinformed one.

"[26] Jay Ingram, from the Discovery Channel, published a rebuttal, saying, "The most important point is that Bakker's portrayal of the dinosaurs in Raptor Red is vivid—vivid in a way few museum displays or factual accounts can be.

[5] Producer Robert Halmi Sr. made deals with Jim Henson's Creature Shop for film adaptations of Animal Farm and Raptor Red in 1996.