The egg was acquired in 2000, but put in storage. It was later identified as a dinosaur egg, and an embryo was found hidden within it.
A well-preserved dinosaur embryo has been found inside a fossilized egg. The fossilized dinosaur embryo came from Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province in southern China and was acquired by researchers in 2000.
Researchers at Yingliang Group, a company that mines stones, suspected it contained egg fossils, but put it in storage for 10 years, according to a news release. When construction began on Yingliang Stone Natural History Museum, boxes of unearthed fossils were sorted through.
"Museum staff identified them as dinosaur eggs and saw some bones on the broken cross section of one of the eggs," Lida Xing of China University of Geosciences, Beijing, said in a news release. A embryo was found hidden within, which they named "Baby Yingliang."
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For the first time, paleontologists have found an unlaid egg inside an ancient bird fossil. That egg may have caused its mother’s death.
When a sparrow-sized bird died about 110 million years ago, she had an egg inside her body. Over time, pressure crushed and flattened that egg. Now scientists report it’s the first unlaid bird egg found inside a fossil.
Scientists unearthed the fossil 11 years ago in northwestern China. Last year, paleontologists led by Alida Bailleul took a closer look. Bailleul works in China at the Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins in Beijing.
At once the researchers noticed something odd: The bird had a strange sheet of tissue between her pubic bones. Bailleul examined a piece of the tissue under a microscope. She found that it had come from an egg. The researchers shared their discovery March 20, 2019 in Nature Communications.
The egg was a first. The bird was too — a new species. The researchers named it Avimaia schweitzerae in honor of Mary Schweitzer. She’s a paleontologist who works on fossilized soft tissues.
Explainer: How a fossil forms
Further analyses turned up more surprises. The mother bird’s skeleton holds traces of medullary bone. This is a calcium-rich tissue that helps to form eggshells. Modern birds make this tissue while they’re producing eggs. The new finding is the strongest evidence yet that ancient birds did the same thing.
The scientists also found tiny mineral spheres in the shell’s outermost layer, or cuticle. There are similar spheres in the egg cuticles of modern water birds, such as quails and ducks. The spheres may protect embryos from microbial infections. Until now, no one had ever seen them in a fossilized egg.
This bird and her embryo had some problems, though. The eggshell has two layers instead of the usual one. That suggests that the egg had stayed in the bird’s body for too long. And the egg’s layers are extremely thin — thinner than a sheet of paper.
In today’s birds, these symptoms can point to a deadly condition called egg-binding. That’s especially true in small birds that are under extreme stress. In egg-binding, a bird is unable to lay the egg. The researchers think this ancient, unlaid egg may have been what killed its mother.
Scientists for the first time have turned up evidence of fossils from soft-shelled dinosaur eggs. This has scientists rethinking how dinosaur eggs evolved.
The earliest dinosaur eggs were more like leathery turtle eggs than hard bird’s eggs. That’s the conclusion of a new study of fossilized dino embryos.
A team of paleontologists studied embryos from two types of dinosaurs. One came from early in dinosaur history. The other lived about 150 million years later. Both sets of eggs were enclosed by soft shells. The researchers described their findings online June 17 in Nature. It’s the first report of soft-shelled dino eggs.
Guegoolithus is a fossil egg known the Maestrazgo Basin in Spain, dating back to the Barremian age of the Early Cretaceous. It is known from 400 fragments but no complete eggs have been found, with shells between .42 and 1.5 mm in thickness. The eggs were probably laid by an Ornithopod and were very similar in structure to Hadrosaur eggs, though hadrosaurs are not known from Europe and it is more likely they were laid by a close relative of hadrosaurs, such as a Styracosternan.
Polyclonoolithus is a recently found dinosaur egg from the Hekou Group in Gansu, China. It is known from one incomplete egg, made up with several fragments, and it was probably less than 10 cm in diameter. The eggshell ranges between 1.84 and 2.05 mm in thickness, and it has branching shell units with irregular pores. It is fairly unknown what kind of dinosaur laid this egg.
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Mosaicoolithus is a dinosaur egg genus from Tiantai County, Zhejiang Province, China, known from the Late Cretaceous. The egg itself is spherical, about 8.8 cm in diameter, with irregular pores in the schell. Though tentatively classified as a dinosaur egg, it’s true affinities remain uncertain.
Nipponoolithus is a fossil egg known from Japan, specifically the Sasayama group in Kimitaki, Tamba, Hyogo, Japan. It comes from the Albian age of the Early Cretaceous. It is a very small egg, known from only a handful of fragments from between. 36 to .53 mm thick. It probably would have weighed about 100 grams, making it one of the smallest fossil dinosaur eggs ever known. It was probably laid by a Maniraptoran of some sort based on its structure and ornamentation.
Plagioolithus is a fossil egg known from the Barremian age of the Early Cretaceous in Japan. It had a three layered egg shell, something very widespread in modern birds. The shell itself was very thin, only about .44 mm thick, and it had a smooth surface. It is only known from fragments, but it was probably fairly small, and is only known from the Kitadani Formation in Fukui, Japan. Given that it had a smooth, thin egg shell with three layers, it is entirely possible that it was laid by a Neornithean dinosaur, making it the oldest known “modern bird” eggs.
