A 70-million-year-old fossilized dinosaur egg discovered in China is giving scientist the opportunity to study dinosaur incubation.
Nicknamed Baby Yingliang — after the Chinese museum where it was discovered — the fossil preserves the embryonic skeleton of an oviraptorid dinosaur and shows the baby dinosaur curled up perfectly inside, CNN reported.
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.”
The fossil discovery also shows the similarities between theropod dinosaurs and birds, according to a study published Tuesday by the journal iScience.
“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.
“Comparison to other late-stage oviraptorid embryos suggests that prehatch oviraptorids developed avian-like postures late in incubation, which in modern birds are related to coordinated embryonic movements associated with tucking — a behavior controlled by the central nervous system, critical for hatching success.”
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 told NBC 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: us.pahilopahilonews.com
