It was found that a dinosaur baby was hidden in a fossilized egg and was in perfect shape.
Scientists found an amazing link between dinosaurs and modern birds by looking at an egg that had been stored in the Yingliang Stone Natural History Museum in Nan’an, China, for more than ten years.
The egg was found in Shahe Industrial Park in 2000 and later given to the museum to be stored. It wasn’t until many years later that anyone realized the egg actually held a perfectly formed dinosaur baby.
Scientists were going through the museum’s storage when they came across the egg. They looked more closely and saw that it had a baby inside that was 27 cm (11 inches) long and was identified as being from an oviraptorosaurs dinosaur.
They are called oviraptorosaurs, and they look a lot like ostriches, but they have feathers instead of scales. They are from the Cretaceous Period, and the egg was thought to be up to 72 million years old after it was studied.
It was called “Baby Yingliang” at the time, and it is now known as one of the most complete dinosaur embryos ever found.
Plus, experts were very interested in the way the dinosaur embryo was positioned.
The embryo was studied by the University of Birmingham and the China University of Geosciences (Beijing) in 2021. The baby was said to have a bird-like posture, with its head lying below its body, its feet on either side, and its back curled along the blunt end of the egg.
‘Tucking’ is the word for this, which is something birds do today.
The study from 2021 said that this position had never been seen before in a non-avian dinosaur, but it looked a lot like a late-stage modern bird embryo.
Professor Steve Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh, who was part of the study team, said, “This little prenatal dinosaur looks just like a baby bird curled in its egg. This is more proof that many traits that birds have today evolved in their dinosaur ancestors.”
He then said that Baby Yingliang was “one of the most beautiful fossils I have ever seen.”
At the time, Fion Waisum Ma, co-first author and PhD student at the University of Birmingham, said, “We are very excited about the discovery of ‘Baby Yingliang.’ It is well preserved and helps us answer a lot of questions about how dinosaurs grew and reproduced.”
“It’s interesting to see that this dinosaur embryo and this chicken embryo are both posing in the same way inside the egg. This could mean that they are doing similar things before they hatch.”
