Oviraptor
Reborn as Oviraptor, you would carry one of palaeontology’s most unfair names. The “egg thief” was, as far as we can now tell, a devoted parent sitting on its own eggs.
Beak, feathers and a puzzling diet
You live around 75 million years ago in the dune fields and scrub of what is now the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, alongside Velociraptor and Protoceratops. You are about 1.6–2 metres long and perhaps 20–40 kilograms, with a short, deep, toothless beak, long arms with three clawed fingers and a feathered body.
What you ate is uncertain. A beak with two bony prongs on the roof of the mouth could crack hard food; eggs, molluscs, seeds, plants and small animals have all been suggested. Your relatives likely had a mixed diet. Some close relatives, such as Nomingia, had a pygostyle-like fused tail tip that likely supported a fan of feathers, and some were found with feathered arms, so courtship displays with spread feathers are plausible. You belong to the oviraptorosaurs, a group of beaked theropods closely related to birds.
The case of the stolen eggs
In 1923 an American Museum of Natural History expedition found an Oviraptor skeleton lying over a nest of eggs thought to belong to Protoceratops. Henry Fairfield Osborn named it Oviraptor philoceratops, “egg thief, fond of ceratopsians”, in 1924. In the 1990s, similar eggs were found with oviraptorid embryos inside, and close relatives such as Citipati were discovered sitting on nests with their arms spread over the eggs, like brooding birds. The supposed thief was almost certainly a parent.
How your family nested
Oviraptorids laid elongated eggs in pairs, arranged in rings with the centre left open for the adult to sit. Some oviraptorid eggshells contain pigments that suggest blue-green colours. Many illustrations show you with a tall head crest, but that is based on relatives: the original Oviraptor skull is too crushed to say for sure.
