Mating oviraptors from China

[bh480@scn.org]

From: Ben Creisler bh480@scn.org
Mating oviraptors from China

Will Downs at Northern Arizona University kindly did a 
rough translation of some of the Chinese text that 
accompanied the photos posted at 
http://www.dinosaurclass.com/dino0905.htm back at the end 
of July. I had made a quick mention of these for the 
mailing list, then tried my hand at a translation, but had 
gotten bogged down in the Chinese names for various 
institutions and some cultural metaphors. For example, the 
text refers to "'mandarin duck' steal-egg dragons"--
mandarin ducks are a traditional image for a conjugal pair 
in Chinese culture according to Will.
This specimen sounds pretty amazing--it appears to be a 
mating pair of oviraptors that were killed in the act and 
fossilized, including preservation of some kind of soft-
tissue organ used by the male. Awaiting the official 
description, it might be permissible to speculate about 
dinosaur soft anatomy--dinosaurs may have had special 
features in their reproductive organs not found in either 
living birds or crocodiles. If so, dinosaur mating may not 
have been quite so physically complicated as some have 
assumed.

Here's Will's translation (not a word-for-word rendering 
of entire Chinese text):

        Documents first account of a male oviraptor sex 
organ's soft tissue.
        Reported by Xiaoping Pan.  Verified by IVPP 
specialist Toulu Jia.

        Director Dong Huang of the Heyuan Municipal 
Museum, Guangdong Province, introduced reporters to a 
specimen excavated in July, 1999, which initially exposed 
only claws.  Only recently has the specimen been prepared
by Mr. Junchan Lu of the Institute of Vertebrate 
Paleontology , Academia Sinica, to reveal two complete 
skeletons of copulating oviraptorid dinosaurs.  Skeletal 
length is approximately 120 cm and breadth is
approximately 80 cm.  The male body is lying on its side 
and is nearly completely preserved due to the compression 
and recurvature of its neck. Beneath the terminus of the 
pelvis, there is preserved a sex organ.
        This tremendous discovery has attracted a great 
deal of attention from the American University of Notre 
Dame in Indiana, and will lead to the Municipality of 
Heyuan as a foundation for dinosaur research.