Scientists have discovered the incredible fossilized remains of a baby dinosaur curled up perfectly inside its egg, shedding more light on the relationship between dinosaurs and birds.
The fossil, about 70 million years old, preserves the embryonic skeleton of an oviraptorid dinosaur, nicknamed “Yingliang Baby,” after a Chinese museum that houses an ancient reptile’s egg, CNN reports.
The bones of baby dinosaurs are small and fragile and very rarely preserved as fossils, making this a very successful find, says Darla Zelenicki, assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Calgary, Canada.
“This is an amazing piece … I’ve worked on dinosaur eggs for 25 years and have never seen anything like it,” says Zelenicki, co-author of the study, published Tuesday in iScience. “Until now, little was known about what was going on inside a dinosaur egg before it hatched, because there are so few embryonic skeletons, especially those that are intact and preserved in life.”
The egg is about 17 centimeters long, and the baby dinosaur curled up inside it is estimated to be 27 centimeters from head to tail. Researchers believe that as an adult, if he survived, he would reach about two to three meters in length.
According to the Hong Kong Free Press website, the fossil was found in Ganzhou, southern China, and belonged to a toothless theropod dinosaur or oviraptorosaurus.
“This is one of the finest dinosaur embryos ever discovered in history,” University of Birmingham researcher Fion Weissum Ma, co-author of an article in iScience, told AFP.
Ma and his colleagues found that the “Baby Yingliang” head lay beneath his body, his legs bent at his sides and back — a posture never seen before in dinosaurs, but reminiscent of modern birds. Chicks preparing to hatch tuck their heads under their right wing to stabilize their heads while they crack the shells with their beaks.
“This indicates that this behavior of modern birds first evolved and arose in their dinosaur ancestors,” says Ma.
Oviraptorosaurs, which means egg-snatcher lizards, were feathered dinosaurs that lived in what is now Asia and North America during the late Cretaceous. They had different beak shapes and food, ranging in size from the height of modern turkeys to massive gigantoraptors reaching eight meters in length.
Researchers believe that the baby dinosaur found in the egg is between 72 and 66 million years old, and likely survived by a sudden landslide that buried it for years to come.
The specimen was one of several egg fossils that were forgotten in museum storage for decades. But the research team suspected that the eggs might contain unborn dinosaurs, and scraped off part of the Little Inliang eggshell, revealing a fetus hidden inside.
“This dinosaur embryo inside its egg is one of the most beautiful fossils I’ve ever seen,” says Professor Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh and a member of the research team. “This small prenatal dinosaur looks like a chick curled up in an egg, which is further evidence that many of the traits common to modern birds first appeared in their dinosaur ancestors.”
The team hopes to study the infant Yingliang in greater detail using advanced scanning techniques to display its complete skeleton, including the bones of the skull, because part of the body is still covered in fossils.
.