Oviraptor

A mother’s love is ancient and universal. Mothers have protected their young for millions of years. You can find caring mothers among fish, amphibians, birds, and, of course, mammals. You’ll even find some insects who care for their offspring. But let’s not drift off. I haven’t even introduced myself.

You call me Oviraptor, and I lived about 75 million years ago. You might regard me as an individual fossil, a character, so to speak, but my voice echoes like a chorus for all Oviraptors who once roamed this earth. The vibrations of my past life carry into the present for you to learn from and perhaps understand. But more on that later.

 My kind died out 72 million years ago. However, my descendants still live among you today. When I was alive, I had a different name, but I am unable to write it down here, or even pronounce it. It would be futile. You wouldn’t be able to make sense of it. And, truth be told, there’s very little you can make sense of.

When you found me, unearthed me, and discovered my remains, you made quite a few mistakes. The way you measure time, the way I have understood it, you discovered my remains at the beginning of your 20^th century. Roy Chapman Andrews, a so-called naturalist, found me. He classified me as a dinosaur. I give you that; you got that right. But from then on, you got it all wrong. Henry Fairfield Osborn, an American palaeontologist gave me this new and rather odd name: Oviraptor.

I prefer my original one, but as I said, you wouldn’t understand it. My new name is very incorrect, but at the same time I think it’s funny. Let me explain:

Because when you found me, I wasn’t on my own. I had company. You discovered my skeleton with the remains of a nest. Your first thought, for whatever reason, and perhaps this says more about your species than it says about mine, was that you caught a thief in the act. Or to be precise, a thief in the act of thieving.

You thought that the eggs I was found with, belonged to Protoceratops. And that I was about to eat them all. Protoceratops were quiet herbivores of the desert who lived at the same time as my species did and died out when I died out. In some ways we were actually similar. They had beaks but used them to bite roots and other hard-to-digest plants of the desert. I used my beak to catch lizards, large insects, and other smaller dinosaurs. You also thought that I used my beak to break open eggs so I could get to their precious proteins like I was apparently doing the moment I died.

So, this is why you called me an egg thief. Ovis is your ancient Greek word for egg, and raptor translates into thief or predator. I guess, on some level, it does make sense that you come to this conclusion. However, the thing that bothers me is that back then, you had no proof that the eggs belonged to Protoceratops.

Because the fact is they weren’t well preserved. You didn’t know who the eggs belonged to. You chose to assume that this had to be a scene of a thief stealing, a moment of a brutal world fossilised in time where unborn hatchlings were being devoured by a cunning carnivore.

As I have said before, perhaps your conclusion about my moment of death reflects more upon your world than on mine. From everything I have heard, the echoes of time that whispered to me, I have come to a conclusion myself: that you live in a brutal world.

Because why did two American palaeontologists find my remains in Mongolia? Why wasn’t it Mongolian palaeontologists who found me? It’s their country, their earth. What did Americans do there? Besides, they also took my remains with them to America. They are the ones who did the thieving. I am not getting into this further. I am a dead theropod dinosaur. I know very little about human politics, but even I can clearly see that some things in the story of my discovery don’t add up.

History, however, plays out in funny ways. As I said, the Americans got it all wrong. They assumed and decided things they couldn’t possibly know at the time. It was years later when my reputation was restored. And I am quite happy to say that it was a Mongolian palaeontologist, Rinchen Barsbold, who finally realised that I wasn’t stealing anyone’s eggs but that I was protecting my own eggs. Mongolian palaeontologists did the research; they gave the matter more thought, and also, by that point, had better technology to analyse my remains and the remains of the eggs. They understood that I was a mother, caring for a future generation.

It is also true that I never got to be a mother. I died before my hatchlings saw the light of a Cretaceous world. It was a desert storm that buried me and all my relatives within less than a minute. We were preserved throughout time and space, and here we are, echoes of the past, reminiscing about a time lost forever.

This is a brutal truth for a brutal world. Yet, before I fall silent again and return to immobile stone, I want to say something I mentioned at the beginning. A lot of my relatives and descendants are still alive today. And they are everywhere. Birds live on land, in jungles, and in deserts. They have conquered the skies, the seas, and even the remotest parts of the world, the Arctic and Antarctic. And within every single one of them lives the beauty of parental care.

Some birds cover unfathomable distances to reach their nesting grounds. They cross oceans and deserts and mountains. Males and females, and even some same-sex couples, find each other again and again after months of being apart. They recognise each other’s individual voices, belonging to a chorus of one.

Tragedy hits every day. But the fact that I was alive, that I did what I did, resonates into the present and the future. You can never know what will happen. As I have said before, history and the history of life play out in unexpected and peculiar ways. Perhaps your species can take hope from that. Like a Mongolian palaeontologist correcting the mistakes of American palaeontologists and reclaiming the knowledge of their earth.

I hope I could share some 75-million-year-old wisdom with you. I will go back to sleep now, dreaming of a world that is not lost but transforms every day.