Re: Oviraptor

[rowe@lepomis.psych.upenn.edu (Mickey Rowe)]

Tom Holtz writes about Oviraptor:

>It is still a theropod.  It may indeed be an egg eater, but the eggs
>it was associated with were its own.

..

>The "Protoceratops" eggs were not from Protoceratops, but from
>Oviraptor, as a series of new fossils conclusively documents.  The
>association of those eggs with Protoceratops since the 1920s was based
>on the questionable assumption that the most common skeletal fossil
>must be the layer of the most common egg fossils in the Djadochta
>Formation.

 With all this talk about wanting to rename things, I'm surprised
nobody's mentioned the trivial name of one of the
Oviraptors--philoceratops.  I gather that the name originally was
meant to indicate that Oviraptor loved to eat the eggs of
Protoceratops?  Then again, perhaps now the trivial name is better
since philos is "brotherly love".  Oviraptor didn't prey on
ceratopsians... they just hung out with them :-) (Sorry, but I've been
dealing with dinosaur list stuff most of the day and I'm a little
punchy!)

-- 
Mickey Rowe     (rowe@lepomis.psych.upenn.edu)