Word: oviraptor
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...predatory-dinosaur embryo, the first ever discovered, fossilized just as it was about to hatch during the Cretaceous period, more than 70 million years ago. The embryo and its potato-size egg, found in a rocky nest along with at least eight other eggs, are from a kind of oviraptor, an ostrich-size cousin of both tyrannosaurs and velociraptors. And several aspects of the discovery make the parallels between dinosaurs and birds stronger than ever...
...area Andrews explored belonged to a vegetarian dinosaur called Protoceratops, so Andrews thought the eggs did too. Since a predator's remains were found lying on top of one clutch of eggs, scientists assumed that it had died in the act of eating them and named it Oviraptor, or egg stealer. But Norell's discovery makes it clear that the unfairly maligned "thief" was more likely a mother dinosaur incubating its own eggs...
...clue to the monster's motherly instincts may come from two tiny skulls that Norell found in the nest. They belong to a different type of predatory dinosaur known as dromaeosaurs. While they could have been egg stealers themselves, they could also have been brought in by the mother oviraptor as food. Or they might have emerged from eggs sneaked into the nest by a mother dromaeosaur so her young could be raised by unsuspecting surrogate parents -- a strategy used by modern cuckoos...
...because the canal running through them varies in size according to the number of nerve fibers it contains, and that in turn depends on how much the muscles controlled by these nerves are used. Giffin is trying to determine whether theropods -- the dinosaurian suborder that includes fierce predators like Oviraptor, Deinonychus, Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex -- could have used their undersize forelimbs for grasping or whether the arms were purely vestigial...
...China's leading paleontologist, Dong Zhiming, believes some meat eaters too may have been caring parents. In fact, he takes the contrarian view that Oviraptor, a toothless predator whose very name means egg stealer, is the victim of a bum rap. The sharp-clawed creature has been found in close proximity to nests not because it was poised to devour unhatched babies but because "it was the mother and was protecting them," says Dong...