Primeval animals
A look inside a petrified egg: Baby dinosaur crouched like a chick
A photo of the “Baby Yingliang” oviraptorosaur embryo. Photo: Xing et al./iScience/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
A fossil dinosaur embryo lay unexplored in a warehouse for a long time. A Sino-British research team has now devoted itself to the skeleton – and gained new knowledge.
An astonishingly well-preserved skeleton of a dinosaur embryo in a fossilized egg has provided new insights into the development of primeval animals.
The oviraptosaurus baby had assumed a crouching position that was previously only known in birds, as the study by a Chinese-British research team showed, the results of which are presented in the specialist magazine «iScience».
The researchers are now wondering whether this behavior might have developed during the Cretaceous period between 145 and 66 million years ago in the dinosaurs known as theropods, from which birds later emerged. “We were surprised to see how this beautifully preserved embryo lay in a bird-like position in a dinosaur egg,” said Waisum Ma of the University of Birmingham.
The fossil dinosaur embryo comes from the Chinese city of Ganzhou in Jiangxi Province in southern China and has been slumbering unexplored in a camp since the turn of the millennium. It was not until about ten years later that employees of the Yingliang Stone Nature History Museum identified several fossils as dinosaur eggs and discovered the bones that had now been examined in one of them, according to Lida Xing from the University of Geosciences in Beijing. The discovered dinosaur offspring was baptized with the name “Baby Yingliang”. The fossil will now be investigated further.