Fighting Dinosaurs Fossil: Velociraptor and Protoceratops (1971)

The Fighting Dinosaurs fossil is one of the most remarkable dinosaur specimens ever found: a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops preserved locked together in combat. It was discovered in August 1971 at Tugrugiin Shiree in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert by the Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expedition. Because fossils rarely capture behaviour, the specimen offers a direct glimpse of a predator and its prey in the Late Cretaceous, some 75 to 71 million years ago.

Background: the Polish-Mongolian expeditions

After Roy Chapman Andrews’ expeditions of the 1920s, the Gobi remained largely closed to Western scientists for decades. In the 1940s Soviet expeditions worked in the region, and from 1963 the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences organised a long series of joint expeditions.

The Polish side was led by the palaeontologist Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, a specialist in early mammals, who was one of the first women to lead major palaeontological expeditions. Field seasons between 1963 and 1971 produced a vast collection of Cretaceous dinosaurs, mammals and lizards. Mongolian scientists, among them the young palaeontologist Rinchen Barsbold, worked alongside the Polish team.

What happened in 1971

The 1971 season was the last of the main series of expeditions. At Tugrugiin Shiree, a site of sandstone bluffs in the southern Gobi, the team excavated a block that contained two complete, articulated skeletons intertwined with each other.

One was Velociraptor mongoliensis, a small feathered predatory dinosaur. The other was Protoceratops andrewsi, a sheep-sized plant-eater with a parrot-like beak and a bony frill at the back of its skull. Their positions immediately suggested that they had died in the middle of a struggle.

The rocks at Tugrugiin Shiree belong to the Djadokhta Formation, which was laid down in an arid environment of sand dunes, dry plains and occasional ponds. The same formation has produced many complete Protoceratops skeletons, nests and small mammals.

What the fossil shows

The two animals are preserved in close contact. The Velociraptor lies partly beneath its opponent. Its right arm is caught in the jaws of the Protoceratops, which appears to have bitten down on it, while the Velociraptor’s left hand is held against the Protoceratops’s head.

Most strikingly, an enlarged sickle-shaped claw on one of the Velociraptor’s feet rests in the throat and neck region of the Protoceratops. This suggests that the predator was kicking or slashing at a vulnerable area when both were overwhelmed.

The fossil therefore records an attack in which neither animal had yet won. It is direct evidence that Velociraptor preyed on, or at least fought, animals as large as an adult Protoceratops, which may have weighed several times as much as the predator.

The two combatants

Velociraptor was a dromaeosaurid, a member of the same family of feathered predators as the North American Deinonychus. It had a long, low skull with sharp serrated teeth, grasping hands with three clawed fingers and a stiffened tail. Like its relatives, it walked on two toes of each foot, holding the large sickle claw on the second toe raised off the ground.

Protoceratops was an early relative of the horned dinosaurs such as Triceratops, though it had no true horns. It walked on four legs, had a deep skull with a sharp beak and powerful jaw muscles, and carried a bony frill that varied in size between individuals and with age. It is one of the commonest dinosaurs in the Djadokhta Formation, known from many specimens ranging from hatchlings to adults.

The contest was therefore not one-sided. A fully grown Protoceratops was heavier and more robustly built than Velociraptor, and its strong beak was capable of inflicting serious injury, as the bite on the predator’s arm suggests. Some researchers suggest that Velociraptor more often targeted juveniles or smaller prey, making this encounter with a sizeable individual all the more striking.

How did they die?

The exceptional preservation implies that both animals were buried almost instantly. The most widely accepted explanation is that a sand dune collapsed on them, perhaps after heavy rain had made the sand unstable, or that they were engulfed in a severe sandstorm.

Other suggestions have been made. Some researchers proposed that the Velociraptor was scavenging an already dead Protoceratops, but the positions of the limbs and the bite on the predator’s arm make an active struggle the more likely interpretation. The details of the final moments cannot be known for certain.

Separate evidence supports the predator-prey relationship. In 2010 a team led by David Hone described Protoceratops bones from the Bayan Mandahu area of Inner Mongolia bearing tooth marks attributed to Velociraptor, showing that the predator also fed on Protoceratops carcasses.

Key people and groups

Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska (1925–2015) led the Polish side of the expeditions and wrote widely read accounts of them, including Hunting for Dinosaurs. Rinchen Barsbold became one of Mongolia’s leading palaeontologists and co-wrote the official narrative of the 1967–1971 expeditions. The Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expedition as a whole, with its Polish and Mongolian scientists, technicians and drivers, made the discovery possible.

Consequences and legacy

The Fighting Dinosaurs fossil quickly became famous among palaeontologists and is now one of the best-known fossils in the world. It is regarded as a national treasure of Mongolia and is held in the national palaeontological collections in Ulaanbaatar. It has been lent abroad only rarely, including for exhibitions in Japan and the United States.

The specimen also changed how people imagined Velociraptor. Rather than the oversized lizard-like monster of popular culture, the real animal was about 1.5 to 2 metres long, mostly tail, and probably weighed around 15 to 20 kilograms. In 2007 Alan Turner, Peter Makovicky and Mark Norell reported quill knobs on a Velociraptor forearm bone, showing that it had large feathers, like its relatives described after the discovery of Sinosauropteryx.

The fossil is widely used in research on dromaeosaurid hunting behaviour, including debate over how the sickle claw was used. Its evidence fits well with the picture of active, agile predators that emerged from the study of Deinonychus, a larger North American relative.

The Gobi has also suffered from illegal fossil trading, and Mongolia has worked to recover smuggled specimens. The Fighting Dinosaurs, collected under a scientific agreement and kept in Mongolia, stands in contrast as a symbol of national scientific heritage.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1922–1923: The American Central Asiatic Expeditions find Protoceratops and Velociraptor at the Flaming Cliffs.
• 1924: Henry Fairfield Osborn names Velociraptor mongoliensis.
• 1963: The first Polish-Mongolian palaeontological expedition takes to the field.
• 1971, August: The expedition excavates the Fighting Dinosaurs at Tugrugiin Shiree.
• 1972: Kielan-Jaworowska and Barsbold publish the narrative of the 1967–1971 expeditions.
• 2007: Quill knobs on a Velociraptor forearm show the animal had feathers.
• 2010: Tooth-marked Protoceratops bones confirm Velociraptor fed on the plant-eater.

Why it matters

Fossils normally preserve bodies, not actions. The Fighting Dinosaurs fossil is one of very few to capture a moment of behaviour between two dinosaur species, and it provides some of the clearest evidence of how small predatory dinosaurs attacked their prey. It also stands as a lasting achievement of international scientific cooperation in the Gobi Desert.