Scientists Discover a Toothless, Two-Fingered Dinosaur

Here’s a new addition to the growing catalog of awesome and bizarre dinosaur fossils people keep finding: a handful of oviraptor skeletons that have toothless beaks and only two fingers on each of their hands. The dinosaurs belongs to a clade of relatively spindly, bird-looking bipeds, dubbed theropods. And their discoverers say the new dinosaurs’ hands are vivid examples of evolution working in tandem with migration.

BBC News reported on the discovery, which was made in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. The team responsible for the fossil find was led by paleontologists at the University of Edinburgh in the UK; it recently published its findings in the journal, Royal Society Open Science.

The new species of dinosaur, Oksoko avarsan, thrived more than 68 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous Period. The team has identified it as belonging to the genus, Oviraptor. Oviraptors, or “egg takers,” were some of the most bird-like dinosaurs, with feathered tail fans and wings.

Gregory Funston, et al./Royal Society Open Science

“Oksoko avarsan is interesting because the skeletons are very complete and the way they were preserved resting together shows that juveniles roamed together in groups,” Dr. Gregory Funston told the BBC. Funston, a co-lead author of the paper, added that the fossils’ double-digit hands prompted him and his colleagues to focus in on how oviraptors’ upper-body appendages evolved as the dinosaurs spread out from southern China into the Gobi region.

The “two-fingered hand prompted us to look at the way the hand and forelimb changed throughout the evolution of oviraptors, which hadn’t been studied before,” Funston added in the BBC report. He says this will help scientists to glean why oviraptors were so diverse during their Late Cretaceous expansion.