In China, a perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo was discovered
Image credit: People.com
Scientists have uncovered a perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo that is developing from its egg in the same way that a chicken does.
The embryo was discovered near Ganzhou, China, and is thought to be at least 66 million years old, according to researchers.
It has been given the name Baby Yingliang and is thought to be a toothless theropod dinosaur or oviraptorosaur.
It is “the greatest dinosaur embryo ever unearthed in history,” according to researcher Dr Fion Waisum Ma.
Researchers now have a better understanding of the relationship between dinosaurs and current birds as a result of the discovery. The embryo was wrapped in the fossil in a position known as tucking, which is a behaviour seen in birds just before hatching.
Oviraptorosaurs were feathered dinosaurs that lived between 100 million and 66 million years ago in what is now Asia and North America.
Prof. Steve Brusatte, a member of the research team, said “it was one of the most magnificent dinosaur fossils” he’d ever seen, adding that the embryo was about to hatch.
According to the AFP news agency, “this shows that such behaviour in modern birds evolved and began among their dinosaur forebears.”
The Yingliang Stone Nature History Museum in China has a baby Yingliang that is 10.6 inches (27 cm) long from head to tail and lies inside a 6.7-inch-long egg.
The egg was discovered in 2000, but it was hidden for ten years.
Researchers turned their attention to the egg, which they assumed was holding an embryo within, only when construction work on the museum began and old fossils were being combed through.
Researchers will utilise advanced scanning techniques to obtain an image of the dinosaur’s whole skeleton because part of its body is still covered by rock.