The 70m-year-old embryo
‘Baby Yingliang’ preserved in the fossil of a dinosaur egg
A PERFECTLY preserved embryo has been found inside a 70millionyear-old fossilised dinosaur egg.
The ‘Baby Yingliang’ was first discovered in 2000 in the city of Ganzhou, southern China, and belongs to a toothless species that walked on two legs and had feathers but did not fly.
The stone mining company Yingliang Group found the egg but 15 years passed before its significance emerged – when a few fragile bones exposed by a crack in its surface hinted at what was inside.
It is only now that researchers – with the help of CT scans – have been able to reveal the impeccably preserved embryo.
After years spent analysing the fossil – among the most complete dinosaur embryos ever unearthed – researchers say it sheds new light on the link between the behaviour of modern birds and the prehistoric animals.
Baby Yingliang appears curled up, suggesting that the species developed bird-like behaviours when it was close to hatching.
The research team, led by scientists from the University of Birmingham, said the posture is unique among known dinosaur embryos.
Its head lies below its body, they said, with the feet on either side and the back curled along the blunt end of the egg. In modern birds, such postures are related to ‘tucking’ – a behaviour controlled by the central nervous system and critical for hatching success.
After studying the egg and embryo, researchers believe that such pre-hatching habits, previously considered unique to birds, may have originated among these non-flying dinosaurs.
The embryo is estimated to be 11in (28cm) long from head to tail and lies inside a 7in (18cm) long egg. Fion Waisum Ma, joint author and PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham, said: ‘We are very excited about the discovery of Baby Yingliang... it is interesting to see this dinosaur embryo and a chicken embryo pose in a similar way inside the egg, which possibly indicates similar prehatching behaviours.’
Professor Steve Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh, who was also in the research team, said it was ‘one of the most beautiful fossils I have ever seen’. Their findings are in the Cell Press journal.