The New York Times Trilobites column has an interesting story about a tiny egg stealing dinosaur that lived about 67 million years ago in what is now Mongolia. Manipulonyx reshetovi had a strange spike-covered hand, which provided its genus name meaning “manipulating claw”. The animal’s fossil was discovered in 1979 and described in the journal Proceedings of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences last December.

“I’ve honestly never been more flabbergasted by any dinosaur fossil,” said Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the study. At first glance, he wondered if it could be “some kind of lobster larvae or starfish,” he said.

A Russian paleontologist unearthed a fragmentary skeleton of the animal in 1979 in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. The area’s rocks date back to the Late Cretaceous period some 67 million years ago, when this region was a swampy river delta home to diverse dinosaurs, including armored ankylosaurs, dome-headed pachycephalosaurs and the Tyrannosaurus rex cousin Tarbosaurus.

Scurrying underfoot were Manipulonyx, which belonged to a family of diminutive dinosaurs known as alvarezsaurids. These animals possessed tiny forearms that ended in one large digit with a hook-like claw. The other fingers were much smaller. That led some scientists to mistake the dinosaurs for flightless birds.