According to a study released on Tuesday, the fossil record of a complete baby dinosaur, 66 million years old, shows the complete resemblance of a complete baby dinosaur in its egg, just days before hatching, to the therop dinosaurs and the birds they hatch.
The fossil bones of the fetus, named “Baby Yingliang” by the museum in southern China, can be seen curled into its 6-inch-long egg shell, which at that point looked almost like a modern bird. Has smaller arms and claws than wings.
Fiona Wissam Ma, an archaeologist at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, says the head looks particularly comparable to the head of a newly hatched bird – a feature similar to a beak called the oviroprocerus. This dinosaur race. Ma was one of the primary authors of the fossil study Published In iScience magazine. Scientists from China, Canada and other parts of the UK are also involved.
Oviropodosaurs, the Theropat dinosaur species with bare bones and three legs, were very close to the dinosaur lineage that evolved into modern birds. Like cranes, they had feathers on their hands. They could not fly, but there is evidence that they spread their feathers above their nests to keep the eggs warm below them, said John Nuts, a researcher at the University of Manchester in the UK who did not participate in the study.
Embryonic dinosaur fossils are very rare – ancient researchers found them in only half a dozen places. Although some other dinosaur embryos show distinct “egg teeth”, this is the first time they have shown signs of a distinctive posture called “ducking”. Bombs, Nuts said.
Ma said the bending posture is only seen in birds so far.
“Some nuclei are well preserved, but they do not show this posture,” he said. “And some are very fragmented, so it’s hard to see their posture clearly.”
The chicks adopt the posture, with the head “vacci” under the right wing, in the egg a few days before hatching; And embryos that fail to get it properly can rarely hatch properly.
Ma said the ducking helps to cause the first cracks in the egg shell by controlling the movement of the baby birds head.
“It’s easy to stabilize the hook and direct it to the same spot when trying to break the egg hole,” he said.
Researchers say that the ducking pose originated about 70 million years ago because of the early shape of the shell, which was common among dinosaurs, instead of the soft shells of turtles, as oviropodosaurs have hard shells like birds. Sheep-sized protozoans.
Scientists believe that hard shells provide better protection from the environment than soft shells, so Ma, Oviropterosaurs and related dinosaur species may have developed a pulling posture to break their hard shells, he said.
Baby Yingliang was in a repository of fossils donated to the Yingliang Stone Nature History Museum in the Chinese city of Nanan in 2000, which may have been found at a construction site in the nearby city of Kanzhou.
But until 2015 when one of the museum staff examined the fossil egg, he found that it appeared to be a fracture.
The fossil egg has now been scientifically analyzed and the fossil can be seen to have the entire skeleton curled up in its shell.
The fossil record suggests that it is 66 million to 72 million years old. The dinosaur was about 10 inches from the crane to the tail when hatching, and may have grown to more than 6 feet long by adulthood.
Modern chicken eggs take about 21 days to hatch, although they are much smaller than this dinosaur, and scientists do not know how long Yingliang developed before being buried in its eggs. It seemed like it would hatch in a few more days, Ma said.
Many dinosaur experts have hailed the fossil as one of the best preserved embryos they have ever seen. But some are not sure, however, that this is exactly what the researchers described as a pulling posture in the womb.
“This is an interesting finding, but I’m skeptical of ‘ducking’ behavior because it’s primarily based on a model,” said Shundong B of Indiana University in Pennsylvania. “I think more evidence is needed.”
Pi was not involved in recent research, but examined different fossil remains Oviroprocessor bends above the clutch containing 24 eggs, Some had nuclei.
The description of the ducking pose is based on a dinosaur egg with a pocket of air similar to a bird’s egg. But B said in an email that it was not found in this fossil and was not found in other dinosaur eggs.
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