“I wuz just standin’ here, and then I turned around, and there wuz all these broken eggs lyin’ around. I swear, I had nuthin’ ta do wit’ it!”
Oviraptor! How we thought we knew thee! Like so many popular dinosaurs gracing books and other media over the past century, it turns out that the fossil evidence for this critter is scanty, that the taxonomic ideas about it range wide as well as provide sources of confusion, and that the real animal more often gets described in terms of more recently discovered and better known relatives. Writing a description of this dinosaur without resorting to a bunch of comparisons with its closest cousins therefore presents a significant challenge. GULP, here goes!
We may as well start by reinforcing the big story for anyone just tuning in—yes, I’m talking about its reformed reputation as the “egg thief” that landed it in paleo-prison with the other bad boy theropods and which still brands it as its scientific designation. Playing the part of prosecutor was Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History and bestower of some of the most iconic dinosaur names in prehistory: Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor. (Even the defunct names he coined still inspire some paleontologists to attempt reusing them in some way, like how Dynamoterror drew inspiration from Dynamosaurus imperiosus, which was really just a Tyrannosaurus accidentally bestowed with Ankylosaurus armor). An expedition led by Roy Chapman Andrews, the fabled dinosaur hunter, recovered the holotype of Oviraptor from Mongolia. It included material from the arms, the legs, and a crushed skull. Andrews’ expedition also found dinosaur eggs along with this skeleton. Osborn, considering Oviraptor’s obvious theropod features, provisionally concluded that, “[The circumstances of the skull’s situation as discovered] immediately put the animal under suspicion of having been overtaken by a sandstorm in the very act of robbing the dinosaur egg nest.” Subsequent sources speculated that a quick stomp on the skull by a protective parent explained its shattered condition. To Osborn’s credit, he emphasized indirectly that while he favored that scenario, the case remained circumstantial at best: “The generic and specific names of this animal, Oviraptor, signifying the ‘egg seizer,’ philoceratops, signifying ‘fondness for ceratopsian eggs,’ may entirely mislead us as to its feeding habits and belie its character. The names are given because the type skull (Amer. Mus. 6517) was found lying directly over a nest of dinosaur eggs, the one photographed being actually separated from the eggs by only four inches of matrix” (Osborn 1924).Years later, as new discoveries cleared up our picture of the oviraptorid family’s anatomy and behaviors, it became plain that Osborn had blamed the wrong guy by assuming there was a crime to be prosecuted in the first place. The eggs really belonged to Oviraptor, not Protoceratops as Osborn had assumed, and its crushed skull had more to do with the incredibly light construction of oviraptorid crania than anything else.
That said, the diet of all oviraptorosaurs remains a mystery. Their beaks do seem specialized for chomping hard foods (“durophagy” to scientists) in the same way as parrots’ bills, with foods ranging from shellfish to fruit and nuts suggested as possible candidates. Eggs have not been ruled out for at least some species, so Oviraptor may not be off the hook entirely . . . it simply wasn’t eating the eggs it was found with.
With Oviraptor’s image getting some “rehabilitation” in the late 1980s, James Gurney included it in his picture book, Dinotopia, as a nurse caring for dinosaur eggs in Dinotopia’s hatcheries. He altered its name to Ovinutrix—“egg nurse”—in honor of the title. It’s a clever bit of word play, but if we indulge in further word play, the “nutrix” root, referring to a female caretaker and also used in words like nurture or nutrition, could backfire. If we squint and apply a wicked sense of humor, Ovinutrix could kind of transliterate as “eggs are nutritious” or “derives nutrition from eggs.” Conversely, Oviraptor could simply mean “egg grabber,” which was essentially Oviraptor’s Dinotopian job and could feasibly explain its living behavior as well. What’s in a name? Make of it what you will, it’s just etymological silliness!
As the first oviraptorosaur known, Oviraptor served its time as a junkbasket taxon. Over the years, scientists referred scanty oviraptorosaur remains to it which, thanks to larger data sets gathered from more and more discoveries, have since been removed from the taxon and reassigned, sometimes to new taxa, as was the case for Rinchenia mongoliensis, formerly “Oviraptor” mongoliensis. Most scientists currently regard the Oviraptor holotype as the only known specimen of the genus. Historically, though, artistic portrayals have suffered from distortion due to taxonomic instability; reconstruction gets tricky when scientists and artists assign new material to a species (officially or not) only to remove it later. The best approach for any dinosaur aficionado wanting an objective yet “restored” likeness of living dinosaurs—a “scientifically accurate” version—is to regard any artistic representation as hypothetical, then dive into the details on the specimens that inspired the portrayal and the methods the artist used to produce it in order to test its reliability. Admittedly, while restoration by taxonomic comparison poses significant risks, sometimes we have no other choice.
That crushed skull from the holotype (the original specimen) has drawn attention over the years due to the intrigue of having so many bones in roughly their original positions, yet damaged beyond making much out of it overall. Decades of study have rendered better models, but the best might look unfamiliar to many dinosaur aficionados and don’t look much like the sculpture featured at the Park. That’s probably due to Greg Paul’s influential book, Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, and its renderings of the skull. He portrayed it as snub-nosed, with a high crest, and sporting two toothlike projections from its palate in an otherwise toothless mouth. The skull illustration provided in that book is labeled “AMNH 6517,” referring to the holotype. Confusingly, nearly 30 years later in his book The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, he reassigned that skull to one of Oviraptor’s cousins, Citipati, and provided an illustration which better resembles the holotype skull. To date, I have not found any source which could explain this correction or what specimen he used as a model for his original interpretation. It doesn’t come as a surprise, however, due to Paul’s fondness for taxonomic lumping in his books; his maverick classification habits have sometimes led to restoration attempts which have yielded hybridized or chimeric results, like some other artists before and since. The detail of the illustration suggests he did base it on a well-preserved, real skull, but it evidently wasn’t really the holotype as labeled. So like the Brontosaurus, Brachiosaurus, and another Predatory Dinosaurs of the World case, “Velociraptor” antirrhopus (Deinonychus), many portrayals of Oviraptor sport the wrong head.
Roadkill
So what does the real head look like? In a word, roadkill, but scientists and artists armed with data from a plethora of other oviraptorosaur heads—some exceptionally well-preserved—have produced better-informed restorations recently. A study published in 2002 compared the holotype with an exceptional Citipati skull and found that Oviraptor sported a longer, lower skull than most members of its family then known. They therefore considered it among the more basal members of the group, though subsequent studies place it in a more derived position. The skull nevertheless presents an exceptional profile and suggests an exceptional lifestyle compared to the group at large, at least in some ways. Given the remarkable ecological diversity of oviraptorosaurs, playing the exception may really have been the rule all along—dare to be different! (just like everyone else)!
If oviraptorosaur heads exhibit a good amount of variety, their hands exhibit even more. Where Ingenia had a giant first finger but a stubby pinky, Machairasaurus had unusually straight claws, Conchoraptor bore proportionally small claws, and so forth. Oviraptor’s hands grew proportionately thin, long, and delicate. We have no idea what this means. It probably has something to do with food processing and ecological role given how the differences correlate somewhat with their heads, but these are questions of behavior, and fossils don’t record behavior well. What’s more, we don’t have good modern analogues to observe and inspire hypotheses. Among dinosaurs, oviraptorosaurs rank among the most birdlike even though they diverge from the bird line before getting some of their most birdlike features—gotta love that convergent evolution! That might make birds seem like an excellent option for comparison, but there’s the problem: birds practically got rid of their hands in order to use their arms for transportation! At least we can observe the differences and dream, unscientific as the dreaming may get.
Speaking of ecology, the stone surrounding the holotype records a desert environment for Oviraptor’s time and habitat. It shared the overall area with several more species of oviraptorosaur, including a cousin with ancestry in North America. Analysis of these species found that the species most like Oviraptor preferred desert environments to wetter areas, raising the likelihood that Oviraptor didn’t just migrate to the desert to lay its eggs, but rather inhabited the desert full-time.
