As I write this, it's the last day of the year, and I've gone a whole week without a post. I knew if there was one thing I had to get done, it was a dino blog. Fortunately, over the last shopping days before Christmas, I made it to a little store that is my favorite place for things paleo related, the way The Falling is my favorite Alien knockoff. It's a concentration of incredibly weird and wonky dinos that has already been the source of the ankylosaur dino bot, the generic dino bag, and a plurality of my "in the wild" pics (surprisingly not so much round 2). I was counting on finding something worthy of this feature. I knew I had it when I saw this guy.
This is, as anyone who found their way here undoubtedly knows, an Oviraptor, very possibly the weirdest dinosaur ever discovered. The thing about that title that the non-paleo public doesn't get is that very, very few dinosaurs are really that strange as dinosaurs, particularly among the therepods. The medium-sized herbivores could be pretty weird, the most unique being none other than the beloved stegosaurs. By comparison, the big, famous carnosaurs are mostly bigger or smaller versions of the same body plan, with only Dilophosaurus, Carnotaurus (see the mystery box post) and to a lesser extent Ceratosaurus going far from form. We now know the spinosaurs got weird enough to be their own thing, but they were ultimately nothing more or less than a reversion back to the Triassic crocomorphs (absolutely the most scientificest term ever) that the dinosaurs descended from in the first place.
But the oviraptors have a skull structure so unique that we still have no idea how they actually fed. In fact, as nobody but me has ever commented, the one thing it does resemble is a flamingo, the filter-feeding bird, which I semi-seriously considered as a solution to their diet before we found one that weighed two tons. From what we knew then and now, the diet really couldn't have been that strange, as lizards and/ or small dino remains have been found as stomach contents and other closely associated remains. As you all undoubtedly know, the name was based on the fact that the very first specimen was found on top of a nest of eggs that it was assumed to be feeding on, until we figured out 70 years later that those were its own eggs. This specimen is a pretty good representation of how we thought they looked by the mid-1980s, before revisionists started drawing them with feathers. Here's some more pics of the glorious datedness. And yes, I could not get a single one of this thing standing up on its own.
The thing that really seals the deal is that egg. If this was anywhere near normal size for an oviraptorosaur, this would be the size of a football, which would be about as big as actual titanosaur eggs. It is hollow, squeezable and cast in two pieces, which seemed to indicate it would be more or less removable. I initially wondered if it would have a baby dino inside. I figured from inspection in the package that it would be held on with tape or a bit of super glue at most. Naturally, handling quickly established that this thing is going nowhere without cutting something off. The lingering mystery is, what the hell is that tube thing???
As it happens, this gigantic dino still came in a bagged set with a couple more dinos, an out-of-scale stego and a brachiosaur that is probably even more disproportioned but still huge. As usual, the brachiosaur has no semblance of the soft tissue we know it had. It's still a decent old-school dino. The stego is very good, and might have been better with painted eyes, if, of course, they had been painted with competence not in evidence. Here's more pics of the pair.
Naturally, the set also came with some vegetation for scenery. This time around, it's quite decent. Here's a diorama shot with the space marine analogs.
And that's enough for another day and another year. I'm still thinking over what I want to do with this blog, but one thing you can count on is that the Legion will press on. That's all for now, more to come!
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