Oviraptorosaurs are very interesting dinosaurs because of the fact that they
have this combination of characters, things that we expect to see in non-avian
theropod dinosaurs like the long legs that end in claws,
the three fingers in the hand, the long tail, and so on.
But they also have characters that look very, very bird-like.
The skull that has no teeth and has a well-developed beak,
it's very deep, looks almost like a parrot skull.
The very large eyes, the large brain, the long neck is very bird-like as well.
Most theropod dinosaurs only have ten vertebrae in the neck.
Oviraptorosaurs are like birds,
they've added extra vertebrae into the neck as well.
At the expense of the length of the body, which is relatively short.
When you look at the hips,
the hips are in some ways like a normal non-avian theropod.
But in other ways, for example, the number of
vertebrae that are incorporated into the sacrum, they're very bird-like too.
I mentioned the long tail before, and that is a long,
bony tail compared to a modern bird.
But as far as the meat eating dinosaurs are concerned, this is a short tail.
It's been abbreviated, and
there are far fewer vertebrae than you would see in most dinosaurs.
The end of the tail has a specialized
feature in some of the oviraptorosaur species, not all of them.
But they'll take the last couple of vertebrae and fuse them together.
And this happens in birds as well.
It's a feature that we call a pygostyle, or a 'pope's nose'.
It's what supports the fan of feathers at the end of the tail.
And we think in these oviraptorosaurs,
they were doing much the same thing as in modern birds.
So oviraptorosaurs then are animals that, right from their discovery,
have given us some clues about where birds came from.
The interesting thing is though that oviraptorosaurs in the 1920s
already had the answer as to where birds came from.
This bone right here is called a furcula.
It's the equivalent of our collar bone.
It's a bone that's found in most vertebrates including fish.