The Hell Creek Oviraptorosaur — What Does It Mean For Chirostenotes pergracilis?

Since the 1990′s, a few specimens have been kicking around of a particularly large oviraptorosaur from the Late Cretaceous of North America. Unlike the specimens that form the backbone of the Chirostenotes/Caenagnathus complex, these specimens come from the Maastrichtian, and unlike the similar material recovered from the Horseshoe Canyon Formation and elsewhere, this material comes from the late Maastrichtian. The Hell Creek, to be precise.

Were There European Oviraptorosaurs?

You may have heard of this in a few sites recently, most notably at Darren Naish’s Tetrapod Zoology. If you haven’t, check it out along with Matt Martynuik’s take on what kind of animal Darren is talking about, which is represented by a single vertebra.

Revising the Oviraptor Myth

What follows is an historical essay on a subject which was intended for eventual presentation at SVP (here, the second abstract), as part of a projection on research that would resolve something that has never been practically tested. This essay is updated from scraps of data strewn about and leads nicely into current work that should help to resolve some of the issues I raise here. It is not intended to have a conclusion, but to be a part of a larger research paper that would include the practical experiment followed by whatever conclusion I would make of said experiment.

Way back when, the American Museum of Natural History funded a series of expeditions into Central Asia (the CAEs, or Central Asian Expeditions, of which there ) at the behest of then-museum president Henry Fairfield Osborn, under the auspice that they were to discover the ancient origins of Man deep in Asia. While Osborn’s reasons for this (opposing the “out-of-Africa” hypothesis) are irrelevant here, his resources were not, and he would send several expeditions into northern China and southern Mongolia (territory claimed at the time by China). What they discovered there spanned the Paleogene and Late Cretaceous epochs, and supplied the AMNH with ample material from which to spend the next several decades analyzing.

On one of the last expeditions, at Bayn Zag (a site under the cliffs of of the same name, called Shabarakh Usu or “Flaming Cliffs,” and a part of the Djadokhta Formation, which would only become more famous in time) George Olsen [n1] found this:

Oviraptor philoceratops, AMNH 6517 (holotype and only known skeletal specimen).

Better Know a [Dinosaur] – Elmisaurus rarus

This post won’t have much to do with teeth. This will eventually occur, when I focus on toothy things like Suminia (favorite non-mammalian synapsid) or toothless (and known-jawed but edentulous) in which case we come to the oviraptorosaurs, which are odder than you think.

And, plus, I had this image lying around…

Skeletons in silhouette of Elmisaurus rarus. On the left (black silhouette) includes the holotype specimen (ZPAL MgD-I/172, pes) and referred manus+pes material (ZPAL MgD-I/98, partial manus and pes); on the right is the same material expanded to the size of a referred manus+pes (ZPAL MgD-I/20), showing the largest known specimen. Both of these represent only Elmisaurus rarus.