Dinosaurs intact inside a 70-million-year-old egg

Dinosaurs intact inside a 70-million-year-old egg.

An unprecedented 70-million-year-old fossil of a baby dinosaur embryo perfectly curled inside an egg discovered in Jiangxi province, China. It houses the embryo of an oviraptorid dinosaur, nicknamed Baby Yingliang after the Chinese museum where the fossils are kept.

The re-animated illustration shows a small animal in a tightly wrapped position, legs pulled up, back arched, head with beak curved toward tail. The Baby Yingliang fossil is dated to the end of the Cretaceous period, between 72 million and 66 million years old

The preserved state of the embryo and its location inside the egg make the fossil a remarkable find.

Darla Zelenitsky, an associate professor in the department of geosciences at the University of Calgary in Canada, said baby dinosaur bones were very small and fragile and rarely preserved as fossils. This is a particularly fortunate find.

Darla Zelenitsky has been working on dinosaurs for the past 25 years, but this is the first time she has seen the baby intact in an egg.

The egg is about 17 cm long, from the head to the tail of the baby dinosaur is 27 cm long. The researchers believe that if born well, by adulthood it will be about 2-3 meters long.

Researchers from China, Britain and Canada who studied Baby Yingliang and other oviraptorid embryos found that dinosaurs moved and changed positions before eggs hatched in a similar way to current chicks.

There has never been a previous study that has recognized dinosaurs in eggs as similar to those found in modern bird embryos.

Fion Waisum Ma, a paleontologist at the University of Birmingham, said: "It is interesting to see that dinosaur and bird embryos posed in the same position inside the egg. This could indicate behaviour. similar egg breakage".

Steve Brusatte at the University of Edinburgh, study co-author, described the find as "one of the most beautiful fossils I have ever seen", the fossil represents "a lot of evidence for early bird features". now evolved from their dinosaur ancestors".

Pre-hatching behavior isn't the only behavior modern birds have inherited from their dinosaur ancestors. Zelenitsky said the dinosaur also incubated eggs by sitting on eggs in a similar way to birds.