By ELISA TURNER
On a college-issued wooden shelf in my dorm, I have a book of dinosaurs from an outlet store. The pages are glossy and it’s almost too heavy to comfortably hold. It contains over three hundred prehistoric creatures that fall under the umbrella of what we might call “dinosaurs.” The term is a little broader than what comes to mind, interestingly enough — megafauna and reptoids of ambiguous size are also illustrated in all their prehistoric detail.
But this is not about the other dinosaurs.
In my book of dinosaurs, there lies a certain doggy-eared page in the Late Cretaceous Period. On that page sits a picture of the oviraptor.
I keep this page marked as a reminder to skip over it whenever I peruse the book. Not because I dislike oviraptors — far from it — I’m incredibly fond of them, but because each time I read the short little passages about them, I grow far sadder than I have any right to be about a creature that died eighty million years before my time.
Back in the 1920s amidst sands of the Gobi desert, the first fossil of this creature was discovered. The desert sand had preserved the skeleton in near perfect condition, as well as the eggs that seemed to reside beneath it. Paleontologists, through whatever methods they had at the time, deduced that the ancient eggs were intended to be a meal stolen from another dinosaur. Thus, the creature was named “oviraptor”; “ovi” meaning egg, and “raptor” meaning thief.
And for years, that was all she was. I still remember seeing two oviraptors fight for an egg in Disney’s “Dinosaur” (2000), warbling and clumsily rumbling in their fight for a meal, portrayed as greedy piglike thieves adorned in murky green scales undefined behind the screen of a CRT TV.
But at some unclear point between the years 2000 and 2002, paleontologists stumbled across a realization.
Oviraptors did not use their sharp three-inch claws to dig into the yolks of an unknown animal’s egg.
Oviraptors did not wield a toothless beak for the evolutionary purpose of breaking shells.
And oviraptors were not found perched above clutches of eggs over and over and over again simply because they were intent on stealing.
Their bones were found, preserved in pristine condition in heaps of sand, constantly hovering above nests because they saw the landslide coming.
Oviraptors were never thieves. They were mothers.
Their claws were traits found on dozens of other dinosaur species in the Late Cretaceous Period. They had toothless beaks for some of the same reasons that birds do — to turn eggs in a nest to ensure uniform warmth. And their bones were found perched above clutches of eggs because it was the only instinct the animal could rely on when she saw a mountain of sand hurling towards her offspring. Every feature, every part of her body assumed for malice, for the taking of life, was solemnly and instantly dedicated to the protection of it in what would be her last living moments.
But the damage had been done. She had been branded in cinema as a thief. Nearly 80 years’ worth of paleontological papers had been written on her supposed robberies, and the crimes she’d been framed for had gone down in history as common knowledge. Hell, her name remains a reflection of the greed and selfishness she never even had — “ovi” meaning egg, and “raptor” meaning thief. A curse that never left her, even millions of years after the last of her kind died.
It’s practically a parable told over the course of almost eighty years. The oviraptor’s only crime was protecting the thing she was instinctively coded to protect. Sand started rolling towards her offspring, and in a split second she made a decision that those of us with the luxury of being the apex species rarely ever have to make. And with that decision she was frozen in time. With that decision, the subsequent anthropomorphic apex species trotted along and dug her up, only to document her as a thief.
The moral of her story is not one of motherhood — it’s the furthest thing from it. The only moral we can extrapolate from her story is not anything we might ever tell as a bedtime story; it would read something to the effect of — “should you have the audacity to exist in this world as something unfamiliar and scary with claws and teeth, should you make the mistake of being frozen in time doing something natural as breathing to you, but indiscernible to those who might find your remnants, you will not be remembered as anything you may have truly been. Per the precedent set by the shape of your bones and the bend of your joints, your image will be warped, your modelled skin shrink wrapped to every crevice, divorced of fat, of musculature, as if the bones had simply been draped with a tarp of skin and scales, and made to walk again. You will be cast in shades of musty sewage green — nevermind the yellows and reds and blue hues you likely truly wore. If you have the nerve to exist as something ugly in the eyes of the beholder, he will choose to portray you in the same way, and he will twist all the limited information he has about you to suit his sense of masturbatory confirmation bias. And you will go down in history as such.
“Ovi” meaning egg. And “raptor” meaning thief.
Featured image: Betty Cavicchia’28
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