In my last post, I presented an image representing an oviraptorid with the head essentially completely and distinctly fleshed out. This is partly the culmination of examining likely tissues based on skull-only analogues. Some additional suggestions were made based on
In my last post, I presented an image representing an oviraptorid with the head essentially completely and distinctly fleshed out. This is partly the culmination of examining likely tissues based on skull-only analogues. Some additional suggestions were made based on comparison to birds (closest living and structurally similar animals), and this gives us a decent idea about what an oviraptorid head might look like. For simplicity’s sake, I illustrated this head without feathers, so all the integument is skin or modifications thereof.
The first thing to note is that while I argue that the cranial fenestrae should not typically be visible, due to the presence of distinct cranial air sacs or muscles in them, this is not always the case in birds, and birds with naked heads often expose margins for the depressions around the bony naris and antorbital fossa. I don’t think the full infratemporal fenestra is visible in this manner, due to features of the dorsal and caudal margins, but the anterior margin (formed from the postorbital) might have been. This is a 3rd level inference, as similar features in birds sometimes do show up, but not always.
Also, given the medium and resolution (the illustration is naturally only 