Oviraptor Nest at the AMNH

In 1923, Roy Chapman Andrews, one of the greatest paleontologists of all time and the supposed inspiration for the Indiana Jones character, discovered a nest of dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert. Andrews had been sent to the Gobi by his boss at the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn, who was wrongly convinced that human beings originated on the plateaus of Asia. Naturally, Andrews didn't find any hominids, but he did find a dinosaur Valhalla --- he discovered such now-popular dinosaurs as Protoceratops and Velociraptor, in addition to the cache of eggs, the first ever known. Near the nest (four inches away, in fact) he found the skeleton of a predatory dinosaur that came to be known as Oviraptor: egg-seizer. Andrews and Osborn surmised that the Oviraptor must have been on the verge of stealing the eggs when it and its prey were buried by a landslide.

Seventy years later, the museum had another team in the Gobi, this one led by Michael Novacek, Mark Norell, and Malcolm McKenna. Among the numerous other discoveries of the expedition was another Oviraptor-with-eggs, but this time, rather than creeping around near the eggs, the Oviraptor was resting on them. In fact, it was brooding on them, keeping them warm with the feathers that likely lined its body. The eggs were subjected to methods of analysis unavailable to Andrews and Osborn; inside were embryo Oviraptors. The nest, now on display in the Hall of Vertebrate Paleontology at the museum, shows that the thief was actually a good parent, one whose devotion has lasted for 70 million years.