In November 1923, newspapers such as The New York Times reported on a desert whose name was unfamiliar to most Westerners: the Gobi. The Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), led by Roy Chapman Andrews, had returned with tons of fossils and what the press hailed as the first dinosaur eggs ever discovered, preserved in the sandstone of the Flaming Cliffs. The museum took them for the eggs of Protoceratops. Some papers gave their age as ten million years, about seven times too young. The eggs were shipped to New York, where they caused a sensation. The nests had remained intact for seventy million years. Next to them lay the skeleton of a small, toothless, beaked dinosaur, with its skull just four inches (about 10 cm) above the eggs. Henry Fairfield Osborn named Oviraptor, the ‘egg-seizer’, combining the Latin ‘ovum’ (egg) with ‘raptor’ (robber, plunderer). The species name, philoceratops, “lover of ceratopsians,” completed the verdict: that beak seemed made for cracking the eggs of Protoceratops. Osborn later recognised that this might mislead us as to its feeding habits. He was right. In 1993, a team from the AMNH and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences found an embryo inside an egg of the same type, showing that these eggs were oviraptorid, not Protoceratops (Norell et al., 1994). In the following years, oviraptorids such as Citipati were found fossilized sitting on their nests with their arms spread over the clutch (Norell et al., 1995; Clark et al., 1999). The supposed thief had been a devoted parent, and one of the researchers, James Clark, even titled a 1995 article “An egg thief exonerated.”

Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s love of science is well known, and it gave him an overwhelming sense of the vastness of time, in which humanity is a mere accident. In The Shadow Out of Time, his narrator warns that, if his experience was real, humanity must accept notions of the cosmos and of “his own place in the seething vortex of time”. Around 1922, during his early trips to New York, Lovecraft and his friend Frank Belknap Long apparently visited the American Museum of Natural History together, and the idea of a story about a dinosaur egg took shape there. Lovecraft, however, treated it as Long’s. On January 26, 1924, he wrote to Long that H. G. Wells’s “Æpyornis Island” did not anticipate “your dinosaur egg story,” and urged him to write it anyway. A dinosaur, he argued, belongs to aeons utterly remote from human experience, so a hatching in a museum cellar could be handled with a creepiness wholly unlike anything in Wells. He even threatened, jokingly, to punish Long if he did not. Long never wrote it. In August 1924, Lovecraft saw the Gobi eggs that had reached the museum the previous November. He was not especially impressed: they were, after all, the eggs of a very small dinosaur. The “thief” had not yet been formally named: Osborn’s description of Oviraptor appeared in November 1924.

Lovecraft noticed the November 1930 issue of Weird Tales, which featured “A Million Years After” by Katharine Metcalf Roof, a story about a dinosaur hatching from a million-year-old egg. By modern paleontological standards, the creature is a mess: a snake-like neck, a small head, spotted skin and a bipedal run, while the cover shows something closer to a sauropod. In a letter to Frank Belknap Long written on October 17 of that year, Lovecraft complained that someone else had gotten there first; he voiced the same frustration to Clark Ashton Smith the same day. A few months later, Lovecraft began to write “At the Mountains of Madness.” In the novella, Professor Lake finds a cave in Antarctic limestone full of fossils from many ages: “This was my first word of the discovery, and it told of the identification of early shells, bones of ganoids and placoderms, remnants of labyrinthodonta and thecoiidea, great mosasaur skull fragments, dinosaur vertebræ and armor plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing bones, Archaeopteryx débris, Miocene sharks’ teeth, primitive bird skulls, and other bones of archaic mammals…”

In 1931, no dinosaur had been found in Antarctica, yet Lovecraft filled a cave there with dinosaur bones. The first dinosaur remains on the continent were discovered during the 1986 Antarctic campaign on James Ross Island by two Argentine geologists, Eduardo Olivero and Roberto Scasso: an armored dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous, later named Antarctopelta oliveroi. Lovecraft’s guess turned out to be right.

References:

H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, Jan. 26, 1924, Selected Letters, vol. 1, p. 287

H. P. Lovecraft to F. B. Long, Oct. 17, 1930, Selected Letters vol. 3, pp. 186-187

H.  P. Lovecraft to C. A. Smith, Oct. 17, 1930, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill, pp. 245-246

Lovecraft, H. P. (1936). The Shadow Out of Time. Astounding Stories, June 1936. New York: Street & Smith.

H. P. Lovecraft (1936). At the Mountains of Madness. Astounding Stories, February–April 1936. Electronic transcription: Project Gutenberg, EBook #70652, April 27, 2023.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, “A Million Years After” (deepcuts.blog).

Weird Tales, November 1930 (Internet Archive).

“Bring Dinosaur’s Eggs,” The New York Times, Nov. 2, 1923.

“Scientists Motor to a Mystery Land,” The New York Times, Nov. 11, 1923.

The Illustrated London News, Dec. 15, 1923

H. F. Osborn, “Three new Theropoda, Protoceratops zone, central Mongolia,” American Museum Novitates 144 (1924)

M. A. Norell et al., “A theropod dinosaur embryo and the affinities of the Flaming Cliffs dinosaur eggs,” Science 266: 779-782 (1994). doi:10.1126/science.266.5186.779

J. M. Clark, “An egg thief exonerated,” Natural History 104(6): 56-57 (1995).

J. M. Clark, M. A. Norell & L. M. Chiappe, “An oviraptorid skeleton from the Late Cretaceous of Ukhaa Tolgod, Mongolia, preserved in an avian-like brooding position over an oviraptorid nest,” American Museum Novitates 3265 (1999)

Olivero, E. B., Gasparini, Z., Rinaldi, C. A., & Scasso, R. (1991). First record of dinosaurs in Antarctica (Upper Cretaceous, James Ross Island): palaeogeographical implications. In M. R. A. Thomson, J. A. Crame, & J. W. Thomson (Eds.), Geological Evolution of Antarctica (pp. 617–622). Cambridge University Press