Turtle Beaks And Dinosaurs

It’s interesting to note that that beaks of animals come in all sorts of strange shapes, including hooks and serrations. Sometimes, none of this matches the underlying bone structure.

Rendering Unto Nature What is Nature’s Due

Ah, bastardizing titles, my favorite.

Today is a look at a skeleton I showed off before, that of the Hell Creek oviraptorosaur, hereafter HCO. This animal, represented by a few different skeletons (one of which was found with the great “Sue” skeleton, FMNH PR2801) is one of the most enigmatic of known oviraptorosaurs, due to its ubiquity — there are casts of this thing everywhere! — while having not been described … yet.

The Never-Ending Artistic Revision Cycle – MPC-D 100/42

Every so often, new data gets thrown out there that requires us artists to change how we present the scientist’s work. Recently, I’ve been sharply reminded that even when scientists mean well, some things just get mucked up. One of the best examples in the Zamyn Khond oviraptorosaur, commonly called Citipati sp., which is based on a well-known, but rather obscure specimen, MPC-D 100/42 (formerly, IGM or GI or GIN or GI (SPS) 100/42 — so many names!).

And the Nemegt Mother Makes Four

With yesterday’s publication in PLoS ONE, Federico Fanti, Philip Currie and Badamgarav Demchig add more information to an otherwise unknown oviraptorosaur, Nemegtomaia barsboldi. That taxon, described in 2004 by Lü Junchang and colleages and, in Lü’s PhD thesis once called Ingenia, is now more substantially known than it was before.

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.

Diet in Oviraptorosaurs VII – Measuring the Mandible: Part 3, Measuring Points

It is finally time to figure out where good and useful places are to measure. We’re going to be doing this twice, and use these points to show HOW orienting our mandible changes things.

My previous entries on this series include positioning the jaw, or Alignment (part 1) and knowing what you’re looking at, or Labeling (part 2).

Caenagnathid mandible with points of interest highlighted, in left lateral and dorsal views. Mandible modified after Currie et al., 1994.

Expanding the Known Oviraptoverse

Normally I wait a few days to post something, but as the last post is a technical post that only seems to get the attention of func-morph people, I’ll throw some meat out here. This one comes courtesy Andrea Cau of Theropoda (warning: in Italian, but Andrea provides a translator link to Google). Two oviraptorosaurs are now freshly named, one from southern Alberta, and the other from New Mexico, and they deserve a few comments.

Diet in Oviraptorosaurs VII – Measuring the Mandible: Part 1, Alignment

It’s been a while since I’ve added to my overarching plan to describe the diet of oviraptorosaurs, and now is time to continue. But first,

What Isn’t Oviraptor?

One of my biggest pet peeves (when it comes to dinosaurs, anyway) is that when people are talking about Oviraptor, they aren’t actually talking about Oviraptor philoceratops. Mostly, they are talking about GI 100/42, because for the most part, that’s what was said to be Oviraptor for most of the last 50 years.

20 Reasons Why Gigantoraptor is a Caenagnathid

And I’m only going to describe this using the mandible. Let’s get started: