This is the third neck bone we have from the pterosaur skeleton now, making it one of the most complete pterosaur skeletons of its kind. It is an Azhdarchoid, probably related to Cryodrakon.
The oviraptor is a caenagnathid of medium to large size. Super exciting!

Both oviraptors (a bird-like dinosaur) and the flying pterosaurs (related to dinosaurs) had fragile thin-walled bones, so they are rarely preserved. We are really lucky that skeletons are coming out from one of our sites!

And you can read the press release here:

www.rte.ie/news/2025/11...

You can read the paper free here:
Deciphering causes and behaviors: A recurrent pattern of tail injuries in hadrosaurid dinosaurs; Bertozzo, Tanke, Conti, Manucci, Arnott, Godefroit, Ruffell, Fowler, Freedman Fowler, Bolotsky, Bolotsky, & Murphy; iScience 113739

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

This new finding adds to our understanding of dinosaur behavior. Although it might seem unintuitive, these battling dinosaurs being injured during reproduction is in keeping with what we see in modern day animals. (art: Troco) /10

A key implication is that these injuries should only be sustained by females, so this might be a way to infer the sex of dinosaurs. The inability to infer males & females in dinosaurs has frustrated scientists since study began nearly 200 years ago! (art: Troco) /9

Previously, isolated examples were suggested to be evidence of tyrannosaur attacks, or trampling. The new study suggests a mating injury is most likely. This is supported by the often extensive nature of these injuries, & the occurrence of the injury at the base of the tail /8

The new study combines detailed descriptions of the injured specimens with Finite Element Analysis (FEA) which computer-models how a structure reacts under stress. This showed that the injuries caused to the tail spines were consistent with a force delivered from above. /7

A more recently collected Dickinson specimen, "Had Enough", is another of the nine key skeletons in the study. (specimen found by volunteers Stephanie and Samantha Sutton) /6

Here Filippo and Liz look at one of the key skeletons, "Warwick's Duck": on loan at Badlands Dinosaur Museum from Museum of the Rockies for a number of years, and can be seen in the exhibit (found by Warwick Fowler, in 2009). /5

In 2019, Darren Tanke, Filippo Bertozzo, Liz Freedman Fowler, & I met at Badlands Dinosaur museum to look at some exciting new specimens. Dr. Bertozzo proposed a joint study coauthored by paleontologists across the world who had made these same observations of injured tails. /4

Something about the body shape of duckbills made them more susceptible to this kind of injury, but what could it be? In the 1980s Darren Tanke hypothesized that these might be mating injuries, but the idea was dismissed at the time and never formally published. /3

Duckbill researchers have noticed for many years that there were often injuries to the long spines of the tail vertebrae. The tips of the spines were broken, but had healed (albeit usually twisted and deformed) showing that dinosaur survived the incident. /2

From US public lands administered by US Bureau of Land Management.

Collected by Macy Campbell July 2025. Site discovered by Jack Wilson, 2020.
Skeletal image by Scott Hartman (from Wikimedia).

I covered the stratigraphic separation of stygi and pachy in my 2017 strat chart paper. A few people noticed it.

we're not dating them using isotopes, we're looking at some ecological factors and diagenesis. This analysis looks at Ca and Sr mainly.