Photo: Lida XING
A 70-million-year-old fossilized dinosaur egg discovered in China is giving scientist the opportunity to study dinosaur incubation.
Speaking about the discovery, Darla Zelenitsky, an associate professor in the department of geoscience at the University of Calgary in Canada pointed out how rare embryonic dinosaur fossils are to come across.
“It is an amazing specimen … I have been working on dinosaur eggs for 25 years and have yet to see anything like it,” said Zelenitsky per CNN.
“Up until now, little has been known of what was going on inside a dinosaur’s egg prior to hatching, as there are so few embryonic skeletons, particularly those that are complete and preserved in a life pose.”
Wang Dongming/China News Service via Getty
“The head lies ventral to the body, with the feet on either side, and the back curled along the blunt pole of the egg, in a posture previously unrecognized in a non-avian dinosaur, but reminiscent of a late-stage modern bird embryo,” read a summary of the study.
It continued, “We propose that such pre-hatching behavior, previously considered unique to birds, may have originated among non-avian theropods, which can be further investigated with additional discoveries of embryo fossils.”
Fion Waisum Ma, a paleontologist at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, who is also one of the lead authors of the study discussed how the position of the embryonic skeleton resembles features of a bird.
Ma toldNBC News, up until this point the tucking posture had only been seen in birds.
“Some embryos are quite well preserved, but they don’t show this posture,” she said. “And some are very fragmentary, so it is difficult to see their posture clearly.”
source: people.com
