A wrongly accused thief
It was found lying on a nest of eggs and named egg thief. The eggs turned out to be its own.
Feathered and unusual · Theropods
Oviraptor
Egg thief · OH-vih-RAP-tor
A feathered, bird-like dinosaur with a short, toothless beak and a crest on its head.
- Size
- About 1.6m long; 30kg
- Lived
- About 75 to 71 million years ago
- Found in
- Mongolia
Trots after you. Move your pointer and see.
To scale
How big was it?
The bars are drawn to the same scale. On these pages the animals are sized in proportion to each other as far as a screen allows: the giants are shrunk a little and the smallest are enlarged, so that you can see them all.
Good to know
Six things about the oviraptor
It sat on its nest
Relatives have been found sitting on their eggs with their arms spread over them, like a bird.
A parrot's beak
It had no teeth. Its strong beak could have crushed shellfish, eggs or seeds.
Arms like wings
Its arms carried long feathers, though it could not fly.
Blue-green eggs
Chemical traces show that the eggs of its relatives were blue-green.
Buried by sand
The nesting adults were probably buried by a sandstorm or a collapsing dune.
The real thing
Photos of the oviraptor
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
What it ate
Probably a mixture: plants, seeds, shellfish and small animals.
How we know
The famous nest was found in the Gobi Desert in 1923. The mistake was only put right in the 1990s.
Keep going
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