An amazing fossil has been found of an oviraptor crouching on two dozen eggs containing fossilized embryos – seven of which contain “babies” just hours after hatching.
The fossil, found in Ganzhou in South China, is unprecedented in history and contains a depiction not only of the animal and its descendants, 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 theropod dinosaurs that thrived in the Cretaceous Period, turned out to be an absolute diamond.
The soils of China contain the first specimens that dinosaurs were associated with birds and the first evidence of arboreal dinosaurs. The new fossil discovery seems to confirm that this species was one that incubated – on top of its eggs as an incubation method.
“This kind of discovery – essentially petrified behavior – is the rarest of the rare in dinosaurs,” said paleontologist Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH).
“Although a few adult oviraptorids have been found on nests of their eggs before, no embryos have ever been found in those eggs.”
The lack of contextual evidence so far had prevented paleontologists from being certain that birds, as their ancestors 70 million years ago, always hatched their young, but several factors in this find have led to that conclusion being highly probable.
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This perfect pairing revealed so much
Preserved with just a few millimeters of space between fossilized bone and eggs, almost no sediment has managed to squeeze between them, suggesting the dinosaur’s parent was hatching them.
In addition, the oxygen isotopes measured in the embryos set their temperature to about the same as that of the parent’s bones.
“This dinosaur was a caring parent who eventually gave his life while nursing its young,” explains Lamanna, who was part of the research team with primary authors Drs. Shundong Bi, from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Xing Xu, a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. Their study is published in the Science Bulletin with CMNH scientific artist Andrew McAfee who produced illustrations for the newspaper.
Other interesting discoveries included the presence of complete dinosaur skeletons in the egg material, evidence of the oviraptors’ diet, and the fact that not all eggs were incubated at the same stage of development – another characteristic of birds.
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Hatching synchronously is hard work, and in the bird sequence it is done with the help of both parents who alternate incubation tasks. It is thought to have evolved much further down the evolutionary line, as today it is a behavior demonstrated in only a few particular birds.
Oviraptor may have moved away from concomitant hatching much earlier than scientists expected. The sex of the fossilized oviraptor has not yet been confirmed and will hold much to the mystery.
In the dinosaur’s stomach, small pebbles were clues to determine the content of its diet. Today, like turkeys, birds have gizzards, a primitive organ that stores gravel, allowing the bird to pass seeds and other hard or fibrous material through it to aid in digestion.
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“It is extraordinary to consider how much biological information is contained in just this one fossil,” said paleontologist Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.
“We will learn from this specimen for many years to come.”
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