Nawwww! 🥺 This exquisitely preserved baby dinosaur is still tucked snuggly in its egg case. Up to 72 million years old, it belongs to a group of feathered theropods with toothless parrot-like beaks: 📷 Lida Xing et al., iScience, 2021
This latest find is a long-awaited discovery, and one that might not have surfaced had museum staff not uncovered the fossil which had been sitting in storage for about ten years."We were surprised to see this embryo beautifully preserved inside a dinosaur egg, lying in a bird-like posture,"Waisum Ma of the University of Birmingham."This posture had not been recognized in non-avian dinosaurs before.
The almost-complete skeleton measuring roughly 23.5 cm from head to tail is curled up inside the elongated fossilized egg, which is nearly a whole 7 cm shorter than the embryo. This tucking posture was thought to be unique to birds, which bend their bodies and tuck their heads under a wing to ready themselves for hatching.Yingliang', is not known, and the relationship between tucking and hatching is still uncertain for extinct theropods, this rare specimen preserved in superb detail provides some cracking insights into dinosaur development and evolution.
But since there are only a handful of fossilized dinosaur embryos discovered to date, and few specimens preserved in such detail, making meaningful comparisons of embryonic development in dinosaurs is difficult to say the least.
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