Baby dinosaur discovered inside 66-million-year-old fossilized egg
The oviraptorosaur embryo known as Baby Yingliang, one of the best-preserved dinosaur embryos ever reported.A 66-million-year-old fossil of a complete baby dinosaur in its egg, apparently just a few days before it would have hatched, shows the remarkable similarities between theropod dinosaurs and the birds they would evolve into, according to a study published Tuesday.
Oviraptorosaurs, a type of theropod dinosaur with hollow bones and three-toed limbs, were very close to the dinosaur ancestry that evolved into modern birds. As well as beaks, they had feathers on their arms. They couldn’t fly, but there is evidence that they spread the feathers out above their nests to keep the eggs beneath them warm, said John Nudds, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in the U.K, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Baby birds adopt the posture, with their heads “tucked” under their right wings, in the egg just a few days before they hatch; embryos that fail to get it right are seldom able to hatch properly. The researchers suggest that the tucking posture evolved because oviraptorosaurs had hard shells, like those of birds, instead of soft shells, like those of turtles — an early form of shell that was still common about 70 million years ago among dinosaurs like theScientists think hard eggshells gave better protection from the environment than soft shells, so oviraptorosaurs and related dinosaur species may have evolved the tucking posture to break through their harder eggshells, Ma said.
The fossilized egg has now been scientifically analyzed and the fossil split so the complete skeleton of the embryo can be seen curled up in its shell.
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