An attentive oviraptorid theropod dinosaur broods its nest of blue-green eggs while its mate looks on in what is now Jiangxi Province of southern China some 70 million years ago. Artwork by Zhao Chuang, PNSO.
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History has announced an amazing dinosaur find. The fossils are of an adult oviraptorid theropod dinosaur sitting on a nest of eggs, The eggs include fossilized baby dinosaurs. This specimen was found in the Jiangxi Providence of southern China. The animal lived about 70 million years ago. Ironically, oviraptors, whose name mean "egg thief", seem to have been attentive parents. In the 1920s, when the first Oviraptor specimen was discovered, it was thought that dinosaurs did not tend their nests. That first specimen was discovered in a nest of supposedly Protoceratops eggs. Those eggs are now thought to be Oviraptor eggs and the individual animal was probably an attentive parent.
A multinational team of researchers has announced a first for the world of paleontology: a dinosaur preserved sitting atop a nest of its own eggs that include fossilized babies inside. The scientific paper describing the discovery was recently published in the journal Science Bulletin. The primary authors are Drs. Shundong Bi, professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and research associate at Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH), and Xing Xu, paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. The research team also includes CMNH co-interim director and lead dinosaur paleontologist Dr. Matt Lamanna. CMNH scientific artist Andrew McAfee produced illustrations for the paper.
“Dinosaurs preserved on their nests are rare, and so are fossil embryos. This is the first time a non-avian dinosaur has been found, sitting on a nest of eggs that preserve embryos, in a single spectacular specimen,” explains Dr. Bi.
The fossil in question is that of an oviraptorosaur, a group of bird-like theropod dinosaurs that thrived during the Cretaceous Period, the third and final time period of the Mesozoic Era (commonly known as the ‘Age of Dinosaurs’) that extended from 145 to 66 million years ago. CMNH’s famous “Chicken from Hell,” Anzu wyliei, is another type of oviraptorosaur. However, whereas Anzu is part of the largely North American oviraptorosaur subgroup Caenagnathidae, the new fossil is a member of another major subgroup, the Oviraptoridae, which has thus far been found only in Asia. The new specimen was recovered from uppermost Cretaceous-aged rocks, some 70 million years old, in Ganzhou City in southern China’s Jiangxi Province.
The fossil consists of an incomplete skeleton of a large, presumably adult oviraptorid crouched in a bird-like brooding posture over a clutch of at least 24 eggs. At least seven of these eggs preserve bones or partial skeletons of unhatched oviraptorid embryos inside. The late stage of development of the embryos and the close proximity of the adult to the eggs strongly suggests that the latter died in the act of incubating its nest, like its modern bird cousins, rather than laying its eggs or simply guarding its nest crocodile-style, as has sometimes been proposed for the few other oviraptorid skeletons that have been found atop nests.
