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An unprecedented fossil of a baby dinosaur perfectly encased in 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 was named Baby Yingliang after the Chinese Museum that houses the fossil. The tiny dinosaur bones are small, brittle, and rarely preserved as fossils, making this a very fortunate find, said Darla Zelenitsky, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Calgary in Canada.
"It's a great specimen...I've been working on dinosaur eggs for 25 years and haven't seen anything like it yet," said Zelenitsky, who is one of the authors of the research published in iScience on Tuesday.
"So far, little is known about what was going on inside a pre-hatched dinosaur egg, as there are very few embryonic skeletons, especially those that are complete and preserved in life," she said in an email.
The egg was about 17 cm (7 in) long and the dinosaur was estimated to be about 27 cm (11 in) long from head to tail. Researchers believe that as an adult, had he lived, he would have been about two to three meters tall.
Researchers from China, the United Kingdom, and Canada studied the positions of Baby Yingliang and other previously found Oviraptorid embryos. They concluded that dinosaurs moved and changed positions before hatching in a manner similar to baby birds.
In modern birds, these movements are associated with a behavior called flexion, which is controlled by the central nervous system and is critical to successful hatching.
"Most known non-avian dinosaur embryos are incomplete with dislocated skeletons (bones separated at joints)," Wisom Ma, lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of Birmingham, UK, said in a statement.
"We were surprised to see this embryo beautifully preserved inside a dinosaur egg, lying in a bird-like position. This position had not been recognized in non-avian dinosaurs before."
All birds evolved directly from a group of two-legged dinosaurs known as theropods, whose members include the perennial tyrannosaurs and the smaller velociraptor.
Pre-hatching behavior is not the only behavior that modern birds have inherited from their dinosaur ancestors. It's also known that the same species of dinosaurs perched on their eggs, Zelenitsky said, in a similar way to birds.
The fossil was found in China's Jiangxi Province and was acquired in 2000 by Liang Liu, director of a Chinese stone company called Yingliang Group. It ended up in storage, and was largely forgotten until about 10 years later, when museum staff sorted out the boxes and discovered the fossil during the construction of the Yingliang Stone Museum of Natural History. The museum is supported by the company.
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