#apatoraptor

Merry day seven of Dino-December! Today's animal of the day is Apatoraptor pennatus!

Image credit: S. Mohr

This species of theropod dinosaur lived during the Late Cretaceous period in what is now Canada. As you can probably tell from its appearance, it is a distant cousin of Oviraptor and belonged to the Oviraptorosaur group. However, the two dinosaurs were actually in two separate sister families, with Oviraptor being in the Oviraptorid family and Apatoraptor belonging to a closely related family called Caenagnathidae. Apatoraptor actually has kind of a sad/interesting, with its remains being first discovered in 1993 at the Horseshoe Canyon Formation of Alberta, Canada. They were originally classified as an ornithomimid dinosaur and were deemed relatively unimportant, so it wasn't until 2002 that paleontologists first began prepping the specimen for study. However, the paleontologists working on Apatoraptor (which hadn't yet been named or even identified as a new species) almost immediately abandoned it since they assumed that the specimen didn't have a skull, recovered it in plaster, and put it in storage until 2008, when it was identified as an entirely new genus of Oviraptorosaur.

Image credit: cisiopurple on DeviantArt

By José Carlos Cortés on @ryuukibart​

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Name: Apatoraptor pennatus

Name Meaning: Apatè Robber

First Described: 2016

Described By: Funston & Currie

Classification: Dinosauria, Saurischia, Eusaurischia, Theropoda, Neotheropoda, Averostra, Tetanurae, Orionides, Avetheropoda, Coelurosauria, Tyrannoraptora, Maniraptoriformes, Maniraptora, Pennaraptora, Oviraptorosauria, Caenagnathoidea, Caenagnathidae, Elmisaurinae

Apatoraptor is a recently named genus of Oviraptorosaur from the Horseshoe Canyon Formation in Alberta, Canada. It lived around 74 million years ago, in the Campanian age of the Late Cretaceous. It is known from a fairly well preserved partial skeleton and skull, and it had quill knobs preserved on its arms. Though phylogenetic bracketing would imply that it had wings already, it’s always nice to have confirmation. It probably used its wings for display to mates, as Oviraptorosaurs were incapable of powering flight. It was two meters long and probably weighed about 180 kilograms. Being in the Horseshoe Canyon Formation, it lived alongside many other dinosaurs, such as Epichirostenotes, Anchiceratops, Arrhinoceratops, Pachyrhinosaurus, Sphaerotholus, Ornithomimus, and Edmontosaurus. Apatoraptor is especially important in helping to better understand the evolution of Oviraptorosaurs in North America, which have a relatively sparse record compared to their Asian relatives. 

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatoraptor

I have, and it should be in my schedule