Julio
Lacerda
Staff Artist and Writer
The first discovery of the dinosaur Khaan, unearthed in the Mongolian desert, consisted of two individuals that had been buried close together. It's likely that they died after some heavy and sudden rains caused a sand dune to collapse on top of them. The duo were promptly given the nicknames “Romeo and Juliet”, due to the similarities with Shakespeare's death-bound lovers, even though at the time of the discovery their sex had not been identified.
Initial analysis suggested that they were members of the group Oviraptorosaurs—parrot-beaked and mostly toothless dinosaurs once thought as robbers of other dinosaurs’ eggs. Nowadays, they are known to have been feathered and similar to turkeys. Khaan mckennai was a 4-foot long Oviraptorosaur that lived during the Cretaceous period around 75 million years ago, and those fossils would bring a surprise for the paleontologists who found them.
The nicknames came to fit them very well, because further analysis of the fossils showed that apparently they were, indeed, a couple. The researchers from the University of Alberta who worked with the skeletons were adamant with this conclusion. Even though both specimens were around the same size and age and had mostly identical anatomies, there was one key difference between them: the tail bones.