
In November 1923, newspapers such as The New York Times reported on a desert whose name was unfamiliar to most Westerners: the Gobi. The Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), led by Roy Chapman Andrews, had returned with tons of fossils and what the press hailed as the first dinosaur eggs ever discovered, preserved in the sandstone of the Flaming Cliffs. The museum took them for the eggs of Protoceratops. Some papers gave their age as ten million years, about seven times too young. The eggs were shipped to New York, where they caused a sensation. The nests had remained intact for seventy million years. Next to them lay the skeleton of a small, toothless, beaked dinosaur, with its skull just four inches (about 10 cm) above the eggs. Henry Fairfield Osborn named Oviraptor, the 'egg-seizer', combining the Latin 'ovum' (egg) with 'raptor' (robber, plunderer). The species name, philoceratops, "lover of ceratopsians," completed the verdict: that beak seemed made for cracking the eggs of Protoceratops. Osborn later recognised that this might mislead us as to its feeding habits. He was right. In 1993, a team from the AMNH and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences found an embryo inside an egg of the same type, showing that these eggs were oviraptorid, not Protoceratops (Norell et al., 1994). In the following years, oviraptorids such as Citipati were found fossilized sitting on their nests with their arms spread over the clutch (Norell et al., 1995; Clark et al., 1999). The supposed thief had been a devoted parent, and one of the researchers, James Clark, even titled a 1995 article "An egg thief exonerated."
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Categories: Earth Science; dinosaur evolution; H. P. Lovecraft; Halloween; History of Science; Oviraptor;