An article published in the journal “PLOS ONE” reports the discovery of a new species of feathered dinosaur that belongs to the group of oviraptorosaurs that lived between 80 and 70 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous period in today’s Mongolia. A team of researchers named it Gobiraptor minutus and studied the partial skeleton discovered concluding that it was probably a juvenile specimen that fed on hard food such as shelled molluscs and had jaws strong enough to break them up.
Oviraptorosaurs (Oviraptorosauria) lived during the Cretaceous period in today’s Asia and North America and are a group of feathered dinosaurs composed of several species with sizes ranging from that of a turkey to a length around 8 meters. Because of their characteristics similar to those of birds, in recent years it was proposed to include them in the class Aves together with them but the negative opinion of various researchers left these dinosaurs in groups separated from birds.
The classification within the oviraptorosaur group is also the subject of discussions. Among the generally accepted families within that group there’s the oviraptorids (Oviraptoridae) family, which lived mainly in today’s Mongolia, in the area where today there’s the Gobi desert, where in the Cretaceous they were among the most common dinosaurs. In the fossil deposit known as the Nemegt Formation in 2008 the incomplete skeleton of a specimen was discovered among various theropod dinosaurs that was cataloged as MPC-D 102/111 and later named Gobiraptor minutus.
The characteristics of the available bones, visible in the to image along with the drawing of the animal (image Sungjin Lee et al. / PLOS ONE, CC 4.0) are the ones that convinced the researchers that it belonged to a species of oviraptosaur with extraordinarily thick jaws. It’s a morphology that distinguishes it from the other species of that group and is what suggested that Gobiraptor minutus crushed its prey to eat it.
Already in the past it was hypothesized that oviraptosaurs fed on eggs, seeds and hard-shelled molluscs, the discovery of this new species confirms that at least a part of them probably had that type of diet. In fact, in what is today the Gobi desert in the Cretaceous there were rivers and lakes.
The specimen of Gobiraptor minutus studied was small, chicken-sized, but its analysis indicates that it was probably a specimen that was still very young at the time of death. Sometimes this is a problem in the study of a species when its physical characteristics change significantly in the course of its growth but the bones available don’t have that kind of change in oviraptorids.
Despite the limitations due to the availability of few bones, the Gobiraptor minutus specimen discovered offered a lot of interesting information, in particular on its diet. This species confirms the existing diversification in oviraptorids, a group of dinosaurs that in the Cretaceous was very successful in today’s Mongolia.
