FIRST SOFT-SHELLED DINOSAUR EGG FOSSILS IDENTIFIED

Some dinosaur eggs had soft and leathery shells like modern-day turtle eggs, a study led by the American Museum of Natural History and Yale University has found. The discovery was made after researchers analysed the mineral content of fossil eggs belonging to two dinosaurs: Protoceratops, a sheep-sized plant-eating dinosaur that lived between about 75 and 71 million years ago; and Mussaurus, a long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur that lived between 227 and 208.5 million years ago.

“From our study, we can now say that the earliest archosaurs (the group that includes dinosaurs, crocodiles and pterosaurs) had soft eggs,” said the study’s author Matteo Fabbri. “Up to this point, people just got stuck using the extant archosaurs – crocodiles and birds – to understand dinosaurs.”