my stepmother came over last week, and decided to tidy up my room, like the helpless retard i am
when i came back, i had a desk "wow :0" that she found underneath lots of laundry, envelopes, dishes, and further whatnot
so, it took me exactly one day in posession of a clean desk, to draw my first detailed dinosaur in almost 10 years.
these 10 years, i have grown, mentally, and i have also "devised" a lot of theoretic "mindsets" if you will, regarding the procedure of drawing technical drawings. i have drawn countless mechanical drawings (weapons) and other realism-related concepts (the mannequins, for example), and i have especially honed my patience in drawings.
the patience especially, was something i for a long time wanted to "try out" on my dinosaur drawings.
when i was a teen, i always considered my drawings "almost there, but not quite" comparing them to my idols.
i decided to draw an old famous fellow tentatively known as "Citipati sp.", but most famously (and incorrectly) refered to as
Oviraptor philoceratops.
The most correct way to refer to this specimen, however, is GI 100/42.
^
from its original publication.
In fact, this specimen has been incorrectly labelled "Oviraptor" so much, if you google Oviraptor, theres almost a 99% chance youll encounter THIS one, instead of the animal that IS Oviraptor:
^
it is closely related, but as you can see, much less complete, and more elongated. The crest is completely missing.
In 1997 this was found:
and it was named
Citipati osmolskaeI agree with a minority of researchers, that GI 100/42 not only is a species of
Citipati, but in fact a male
Citipati osmolskae, leaving the skull above a female, sporting a smaller crest - thus resolving the GI 100/42 matter.
As soon as i was finished, i decided to draw another taxonomical mess, in the oviraptorid family:
"Ingenia" yanshini /
Conchoraptor gracilis / "Misrata specimen"
"Ingenia" is super-obscure, and _not_ known from a skull, despite countless museums sporting crest-less skulls incorrectly labelled "Ingenia". To make matters worse, the name "Ingenia" turned out to be preoccupied, and therefore no longer valid, rendering "Ingenia" effectively nameless. Researching "Ingenia" is risky unless you know exactly what fossil specimens you deal with, because of this notoriously systematic mislabeling.
"Ingenia" is known from a robustly built, but fragmentary postcranial skeleton.
Conchoraptor gracilis is known from a fairly well known skeleton, it is slightly more gracile than "Ingenia", but otherwise there arent many differences. The most important part, the head, is frustratingly uncomparable, since Ingenia lacks it.
the "Misrata specimen" is a privately owned (argh) newly discovered specimen, sporting a head _very_ similar to
Conchoraptor, but contrastingly adorned by a tall, spectacular crest.
In 2010 the author Greg Paul baffled me with the following proposal: They are all one. The crest-less
Conchoraptor is simply a juvenile "Misrata", and since
Conchoraptor is allready to be considered a juvenile, its vague differences from Ingenia no longer matter, making all 3 likely a single species (they are all from the exact same location).
To top it off,
Conchoraptor gracilis (the prioritized name) becomes
Citipati gracilis as there really isnt enough to warrant a complete generic separation from
Citipati.
In the attachments are my poorly photographed
Citipati osmolskae, the male specimen (GI 100/42),
Citipati gracilis based on the bodies of "Ingenia" and
Conchoraptor with the newly discovered head of the "Misrata specimen",
and finally a squawking
Heyuannia huangi which i once again agree with Paul should simply be known as
Citipati huangi.
I then got the aspie-twitch.
I ended up completing all Oviraptorids, with a relatively decent skull preserved.
When i was done with that, i decided to go back and actually include the "lumped" ones, for completion.
I just finished
Khaan mckennai, a tiny, slender, crest-less oviraptorid, that is likely to be a young
Citipati osmolskae but not widely accepted at such. This i suspect has to do with emotions, more than anything. Dino-geeks are generally very reluctant to accept "lumping" (when two dinosaur names become one. people feel like one of the two is "lost". obviously, it isnt.)
As logical as the unification of
Ingenia and
Conchoraptor - or
Khaan and
Citipati is, you wont find a single word on the matter on wikipedia, for example, as wiki is edited by especially young "dinosaur fans" who will rather die, than see their beloved
Khaan or
Conchoraptor get "absorbed" by another dinosaur name. This attitude is of course childish and unscientific, but then again, it should be no surprise that serious human enterprise is full of childish emotional impulse.
When i am all done, i am going to properly scan them at my dads, and share them with the world, for free, cus im swell like that
and youll all get the worthless little benefit of being better acknowledged with my favorite dinosaurs - the Oviraptorids!
/el ranto.
