Photo credit: Lida Xing
Fossilized dinosaur eggs and nests are nothing new, but finding a well-preserved embryo inside one of them is most certainly a rarity. However, one such perfectly preserved specimen has been discovered in southern China. This discovery also led researchers to believe that oviraptorosaurs (therapods closely related to birds) remained in a tucked posture before they hatched.
Called Baby Yiangliang, measures almost 11-inches long, but the oviraptorid was curled up to fit inside its 6.7-inch-long oval egg. The embryo also appears to be in a later stage, or for comparison, a 17-day-old chicken embryo. Before this fossilized egg was found, researchers had no idea how dinosaurs were positioned in their eggs since previous fossil embryos were too fragmented.
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Photo credit: Xing et al./iScience
It’s remarkable to get a glimpse into the very first stages of life of animals that lived more than 70 million years ago. The evidence that birds are living theropod dinosaurs is, at this point, overwhelming,” said Lindsay Zanno, head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
