Preserved Baby Dinosaur Discovered Curled up Inside its Egg

A fossil of a Baby Dinosaur curled up perfectly inside its egg is shedding more light on the links between dinosaurs and birds.The 70-million-year-old fossil preserves the embryonic skeleton of an oviraptorid dinosaur, which has been nicknamed Baby Yingliang after the name of the Chinese museum which houses the fossil.

Darla Zelenitsky, an associate professor in the department of geoscience at the University of Calgary in Canada said that Baby Dinosaur bones are small and fragile and are only very rarely preserved as fossils, making this a very lucky find.The egg is around 17 centimeters (7 inches) long and the dinosaur was estimated to be 27 centimeters (11 inches) long from head to tail. The researchers believe as an adult, had it lived, it would have been about two to three meters long.

The researchers from China, the UK and Canada studied the positions of Baby Yingliang and other previously found oviraptorid embryos. They concluded that the dinosaurs were moving and changing poses before hatching in a way similar to baby birds. In modern birds, such movements are associated with a behavior called tucking, which is controlled by the central nervous system and is critical for hatching success.

The fossil was found in China’s Jiangxi province and acquired in 2000 by Liang Liu, a director of a Chinese stone company called Yingliang Group. It ended up in storage, largely forgotten until about 10 years later, when museum staff sorted through the boxes and unearthed the fossil during the construction of Yingliang Stone Nature History Museum. The museum is subsidized by the company.