Pronunciation: OH-vee-RAP-tuh
Meaning: Egg plunderer
Author/s: Osborn (1924)
Synonyms: See below
First Discovery: Ömnögovi, Mongolia
Discovery Chart Position: #145
Oviraptor philoceratops
It's nice when dinosaurs are given names that neatly tie them to an identifiable feature, place of discovery or lifestyle, such as Oviraptor philoceratops—"Egg plunderer, lover of ceratopsians"—which was coined in 1924 by H.F. Osborn who discovered it loitering ominously just a few inches away from a clutch of eggs that he assumed belonged to the contemporaneous "horn faced" herbivore, Protoceratops.
Osborn was troubled by his outrageously presumptuous title of choice and openly admitted: "It may entirely mislead us as to its feeding habits and belie its character". And so it came to pass. Sometime later, palaeontologists realised that the eggs in question actually belonged to Oviraptor, so far from being caught in the act of plundering said nest, it was simply tending to it and being a good parent. However, a fossilised lizard in the holotype's stomach proved they weren't strict herbivores, so opportunistic egg snaffling can't be completely ruled out.
Initially classified as an ornithomimosaur because it was toothless (though it does have two bony prongs on the roof of its mouth), Oviraptor is traditionally illustrated with a huge head crest, but that is another mix-up. Although longer than the corresponding part of other oviraptorids, the holotype skull is so mangled it's impossible to tell if a crest was present. The cassowary-like casque-topped depiction stems from Citipati—a large, well-preserved specimen that was initially assigned to Oviraptor—who not only vindicated "egg plunderers" by being discovered atop a nest of similar eggs but also implied the use of feathered wings to cover them, judging by the brooding position in which it was fossilised.
Osborn was troubled by his outrageously presumptuous title of choice and openly admitted: "It may entirely mislead us as to its feeding habits and belie its character". And so it came to pass. Sometime later, palaeontologists realised that the eggs in question actually belonged to Oviraptor, so far from being caught in the act of plundering said nest, it was simply tending to it and being a good parent. However, a fossilised lizard in the holotype's stomach proved they weren't strict herbivores, so opportunistic egg snaffling can't be completely ruled out.
Initially classified as an ornithomimosaur because it was toothless (though it does have two bony prongs on the roof of its mouth), Oviraptor is traditionally illustrated with a huge head crest, but that is another mix-up. Although longer than the corresponding part of other oviraptorids, the holotype skull is so mangled it's impossible to tell if a crest was present. The cassowary-like casque-topped depiction stems from Citipati—a large, well-preserved specimen that was initially assigned to Oviraptor—who not only vindicated "egg plunderers" by being discovered atop a nest of similar eggs but also implied the use of feathered wings to cover them, judging by the brooding position in which it was fossilised.
(egg plunderer, lover of ceratopsians)Etymology
Oviraptor is derived from the Latin "ovum" (egg) and "raptor" (plunderer, robber, thief), and the species epithet, philoceratops, is derived from the Ancient Greek "philos" (beloved, fond of, dear), and the Greek "ceras" (horn) and "ops" (face). Combined it means "egg plunderer, lover of ceratopsians". In hindsight, Osborn should have stuck with the initial name—Fenestrosaurus—in reference to the many large fenestrae (windows) in its skull that were unknown in any other dinosaur at the time.
ZooBank registry: urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:91B67FEF-527E-42B5-A325-179E99B4F9F6.
Fenestrosaurus philoceratops (Osborn, 1924)
Discovery
The remains of Oviraptor were discovered in the Djadochta Formation at the "Flaming Cliffs" (aka Bayn Dzak and Shabarakh Usu), Ömnögovi (South Gobi) Aimag (Province), Mongolia, by George Olsen on July 13th, 1923, during the third American Museum of Natural History's Central Asiatic expedition, led by Roy Chapman Andrews. The holotype (AMNH 6517) is a partial skeleton and badly mangled skull.
The original nest (AMNH 6508), containing fifteen-or-so eggs, was reexamined in 2018 and found to contain the remains of a tiny theropod hind limb (AMNH 33092), suggesting some of the eggs had hatched and the perinates had not left the nest.
Specimens now known as Conchoraptor, Citipati, Rinchenia were all previously assigned to Oviraptor.
