Dinosaurs had a pre-hatching posture similar to modern birds, suggests a rare fossil discovery

Dinosaur embryos are key to our understanding of how dinosaurs developed. But they are also very rare. While remains of dinosaur embryos have been discovered occasionally over recent decades, most of them have been incomplete, with the bones dislocated.

So the discovery of an almost intact dinosaur embryo inside an egg, dating back 72 million to 66 million years, has come as an exciting surprise. Based on its anatomy as well as the microscopic features of the eggshell, this little creature has been identified as an oviraptorosaur. Oviraptorosaurs were a group of toothless theropod dinosaurs who lived during the Cretaceous period in Asia and North America.

This fossil from Ganzhou, in the Jiangxi Province of southern China, was hidden in storage for 15 years until the curator of the Yingliang Stone Nature History Museum, Kecheng Niu, discovered it in 2015. When he saw some bones on the broken section of an egg, he arranged for fossil preparation – a process that involves removing the rocky matrix surrounding the bones and cleaning the fossil so it can be studied. This revealed the embryo’s full skeleton.

Scientific significance

Recognising the scientific significance of this fossil, the museum invited a team of international palaeontologists (of which I was one) to examine it…

Read more