Smallest known dinosaur eggs found
A tiny bipedal dinosaur once laid its clutch of eggs in the sand of a steppe landscape. The six eggs were about the size of a blackbird.
When we think of dinosaurs, we usually visualise terrifying prehistoric giants such as Triceratops or Tyrannosaurus. But there were actually also very small dinosaurs, as a new discovery shows. A team led by Shukang Zhang has now reported the smallest dinosaur egg ever found. As the team reports in the journal "Historical Biology", the egg measures just 29 millimetres and is therefore a third smaller than the smallest known dinosaur egg to date. It belongs to a partially preserved clutch of six eggs that came to light in the Tangbian Formation in Jiangxi Province in southern China. The egg is comparable in size to that of a modern blackbird. The dinosaur that hatched from it is likely to have grown to a similar size.
The eggs were found in around 80 million-year-old deposits in the Ganzhou Basin, which is known for its rich finds of dinosaur eggs. The animals once buried their clutches in fine sand, possibly near a lake in a steppe landscape; whether they guarded their eggs, which were decorated with worm-like structures, is unclear. Along with the eggs, the experts found the remains of tiny embryonic leg bones. These fine fossils show that the clutch of eggs did not come from a Cretaceous bird, but from a theropod - a close relative of birds that walked on two legs and probably also had feathers.
However, the remains of the animals encased in a dark siltstone are not enough to name the species from which the eggs once came. This is a common problem with trace fossils such as fossilised footprints, excrement and eggs. This is why such remains are given their own species names in the hope that they can one day be linked to the actual animal through further finds. Based on the size of the eggs, their arrangement in the clutch and the microstructure of the shell, which is only fractions of a millimetre thick, the experts have assigned the six eggs a new, so-called ootaxon called Minioolithus ganzhouensis.
Spectrum of Science
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