A jaw-dropping fossil has been found to fall from an oviraptor bent over two dozen eggs containing fossilized embryos – with 7 containing ‘babies’, just hours after hatching.
The fossil has been found in Ganzhou in southern China and is unprecedented in history, and contains not only an image of the animal and its offspring, but also of its behavior.
China has made some of the world’s most important discoveries in paleontology, and this oviraptorosaurus, from a group of bird-like teropod dinosaurs that thrived during the Cretaceous, appears to be an absolute diamond.
The soils in China contained the first specimens linking dinosaurs to birds, and the first evidence of dinosaurs living in the tree. The new fossil discovery seems to confirm that this species was one that hatches – sitting on top of its eggs as a method of incubation.
“This kind of discovery – essentially fossil behavior – is the rarest of the rare in dinosaurs,” says paleontologist Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH).
“Although some adult oviraptorides have been found in their eggs before, no embryos have ever been found in the eggs.”
The lack of contextual evidence so far has prevented paleontologists from being sure that birds, as far back as their ancestors 70 million years ago, always bred their young, but several factors in this finding lead to the conclusion that this is likely.
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This perfect clutch has revealed so much
Conserved with only a few millimeters of space between petrified bone and eggs, almost no sediment managed to squeeze in between, indicating that the dinosaur parent would incubate it.
The oxygen isotopes measured in the embryos set the temperature approximately the same as that of the parent’s bones.
“This dinosaur was a caring parent who eventually gave his life while raising the little ones,” explains Lamanna, who along with primary authors Dr. Shundong Bi, of Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Xing Xu, paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. Their study is in the Science Bulletin, with CMNH scientific artist Andrew McAfee producing illustrations for the paper.
Other interesting discoveries were the presence of complete dinosaur skeletons in the egg material, evidence of the diet of the oviraptors and the fact that not all the eggs were incubated in the same developmental stage – another feature of birds.
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Synchronous hatching is hard work, and in the bird sequence it is done with the help of both parents alternating the incubation duties. It is suspected that it originated much further in the evolutionary line, because today it is a behavior that is only shown in a few birds.
Oviraptor may have gone away from simultaneous hatching much earlier than scientists expected. The sex of the petrified oviraptor has not yet been confirmed and will offer much to the mystery.
In the stomach of the dinosaur were small pebbles clues to determine the content of the diet. Today, birds, such as turkeys, have a home fever, a primitive organ that stores gravel, which enables the bird to pass through seeds and other hard or fibrous materials to promote digestion.
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“It’s extraordinary to think how much biological information is captured in just this single fossil,” said paleontologist Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.
“We’ll be learning from this copy for many years to come.”
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