Egg fossils are why the most expensive among the fossils. Dinosaur egg: what it looks like. Dinosaur eggs as sources of information

And sometimes the shell is decorated with intricate blotches. Did the eggs of the earliest ancestors of birds, the dinosaurs, have such a variety?

This is a tricky question to answer, as the substances that give color to organic materials are destroyed during the fossil formation process.

Yet the latest scientific methods are giving paleontologists an insight into the pigments that color the remains and eggs of ancient creatures.

Back in 2015, Jasmina Wiemann, then a student at the University of Bonn in Germany, found out that dinosaurs were laying off. In the shell of oviraptor eggs, close relatives modern birds that lived on Earth 90-70.6 million years ago, two pigments were found - biliverdin and protoporphyrin. The egg shells of modern birds also contain both pigments: the first is responsible for the blue-green shades, the second for the red-brown.

Wiemann continued her work and, already as a graduate student at Yale University, together with colleagues from the American Museum of Natural History and the University of Bonn, made a new discovery.

The researchers found that the color of the dinosaur eggs was more varied than expected. Moreover, for two centuries, ornithologists believed that the evolutionary mechanisms responsible for the appearance of the color of the shell of birds' eggs took place independently. But in fact, the corresponding processes took place only once, and the metamorphoses touched the dinosaur eggs. It was from them that the birds inherited, so to speak, colored eggs.

"This is yet another instance where bird-specific features are deeply rooted in dinosaur history," paleontologist Mark Norell, co-author of the work, told Gizmodo.

The shell of the eggs of modern birds and their ancestors - dinosaurs - contains two pigments, biliverdin and protoporphyrin.

The scientist admits that in previous studies, in order to study the composition of the shell at the molecular level, he and his colleagues had to resort to mass spectrometry. However, this method requires grinding samples, and the experts did not want to damage the most valuable fossils.

Therefore, the team now turned to an innovative technique - Raman spectroscopy. The technology allows obtaining data on the molecular composition of a sample without damaging it.

Thanks to this method, paleontologists were able to study many more fossils. They examined the eggshells of 19 extinct and modern animals. In particular, eggs of chickens, terns (sea swallows), emus and crocodiles were analyzed. Another 15 samples were fossils - eggs from various representatives of archosaurs, a group that included dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other extinct creatures.

TRIPS

In 2010, the country's news agencies spread sensational news: fossilized dinosaur eggs were found in the Volgograd region! A resident of the village of Mokraya Olkhovka, Nikolai Pekhterev, came across strange round stone formations at the bottom of a small ravine. After a heavy rain in the ravine, a part of the soil was washed out - and an unidentified something appeared from under a 10-meter thick earth ... which was called the eggs of unknown dinosaurs. It is under this name that they went down in history. Of course, various researchers went to the "eggs" and made many conclusions.

In August 2016, we gathered a small expedition and went to see the curiosity ourselves.

Wet Olkhovka is located in the Kotovsky district. An asphalt road leads here from Kotovo; getting to the village itself is not at all difficult.

Difficulties begin in the village itself. When you enter the village, where, one wonders, are the dinosaur eggs? Of course, we started asking this question to local residents, but here you need to understand the specifics of the area. The artifacts are located outside the village, among wide fields cut by dirt roads. Roads wind like streams - scattering, merging, crossing each other. Being on the ground, it is absolutely impossible to understand - where and where the next dirt road leads and if it seems that, here, the right road leads in the right direction - will it not turn in a hundred meters in a completely unnecessary direction.

Accordingly, when you talk to the locals, trying to ask them for directions, you have a wonderful chance to feel mentally retarded: here a person explains to you that now you are going straight, then you will see a left turn, then right, then right and left, and there, after a hundred meters, it is - the right place. You go, take the turn as explained, but you end up in the wrong place. Asking a new counterpart leads to the continuation of looping along the primers, although at the moment of explanation everything seems simple and clear. We circled the neighborhood for several hours.

They stopped the car, went up some hill, from where they tried to spy out something similar to the description

To meet a passer-by in such places, I think it is understandable, is generally a rarity. These passers-by do not always have a relaxing look, they can walk at you with a long knife, so that later with this knife they will thoroughly show you the way. At some point, we realized that a little bit more - and our patience will burst, and we will leave with nothing. And, as it should be, as soon as we thought about this, the place opened up to us! Almost by accident.

Here they are! The middle "egg", judging by the photographs, did not have a large chip with a hole five years ago, but was the same even ball as the one on the far right.

However, there are spheres, ovals, and hemispheres, whole and destroyed. Located they are "haphazard", but heap. Surely there are many more of the same around, just hidden under the thickness of the soil

By the way, this find is not unique for local residents. Similar things have already been found here and earlier. They are sometimes used for construction purposes, and sometimes they are laid out as a decorative element (however, not a single such decorative element we have not seen).

Everyone has a void inside, or foreign material

The three most notable

Inside - ancient petrified material

A chip that has not been there recently

Strong destruction shows well the internal structure of the "dinosaur egg"

Another, similar, in the ground

One of the few whole balls

Oval shape

And here is a huge stone that once lay inside an oblong "egg"

Both from afar and up close, these strange objects look impressive. However, despite the respect they instill, it is impossible to call them eggs, even dinosaurs. It's not even about their size or very large wall thickness. All these "eggs" are different, none are alike, and their shapes, as I have already mentioned, are very different, from an almost regular ball to an oval elongated in length so that the longitudinal radius is three times the transverse one.

The question - what is it, in general, has been known for a long time, however, with some reservations.

Once upon a time, during the Mesozoic and Paleogene period, the bottom of the ancient sea was located on this territory. In salt sea water, such "balls" sometimes roll down from sedimentary rocks, inside of which there is often a foreign object, which has become a "pretext" around which the material began to "roll". These balls are called nodules. Nodules are still formed at the bottom of the seas and oceans.

From close range, nodules in Mokra Olkhovka appear rusty

However, the nodules found near Mokra Olkhovka are unusual. They are very large in size (nodules of this size are rare). Laboratory analysis has shown that they consist of 70% silicon dioxide, as well as iron and magnesium. This particular type of nodule is called a septaria.

On a large scale - mountains!

Despite the fact that the balls found are not dinosaur eggs, they are still very interesting, especially for city dwellers, for whom any large stone lying on the ground, if it is not a monument, is exotic. Unfortunately, the nodules found in 2010 are now subject to increased attention, and, along with it, destruction. Photos taken by other people several years ago and posted on the Internet show that many of the chips we saw were not there.

Interest is good, but we must remember that we must not only satisfy it, but also preserve the subject of our interest, and not destroy it. Unfortunately, not everyone understands this.

Dinosaur eggs lurking in the steppes near Mokra Olkhovka are beautiful in their own way and worth seeing!

Photo: Roman Skoda and Nikolay Stavrogin

When a reader called the editorial office and said that he had a fossilized egg with an animal embryo, I thought it was a stupid joke. But the caller spoke very convincingly and referred to experts. When we met, it became clear that all his words were true.

Just please, please, don't need a pump. I don’t want unnecessary hype and I’m afraid that people from criminals may be interested in me, ”Alexei Severov began right off the bat (first and last names have been changed. - Ed.). And then he took out his treasure from a plastic bag - small stone cuts, they look like halves of an egg.

On the black silicon wafers, the largest of which was forty-nine millimeters long and forty millimeters wide, light gray clear spots were clearly visible. These spots really do resemble an embryo. The embryo of either a bird, or a dinosaur, or (what the hell is not kidding?) A small dragon.

Look, you can see the rudiments of the limbs and eyes. I think a bird might have hatched from the egg. Most likely waterfowl. But these are all assumptions, of course, - says Alexey.

The unique find fell into the hands of an amateur paleontologist by accident. His mother ordered pebbles from the bank of the Sylva River to pave the paths in the garden. Aleksey helped his mother and found a strange one among ordinary stones - in shape it resembled a real egg. Only stone. River water clearly could not have cut a small cobblestone so smoothly. He turned to professional geologists, and they determined that the find was made of silicon, and there was clearly something inside. Having carefully cut the egg into pieces with a special cutter, Alexey saw an embryo inside the stone and began to figure out how this could have happened.

Elena Vasilievna Kororova, Senior Lecturer of the Department of Lithology and Geology of Fuels of the Ural mining university agreed to investigate my find. And she confirmed that it really was an egg, - with these words Alexey gave an expert opinion of a professional geologist to read.

Elena Kororova writes that the egg survived because it turned into stone, and this process is called "fossilization" and lasted a long time - from 60 to 100 million years. I quote from the expert opinion:

"The type of fossilization is silicification that took place in a stable geochemical environment, that is, under conditions of rapid burial and subsequent flooding." And another quote: “Finds of fossil ancient eggs of ancient birds are extremely rare, mostly fragments of shells. The presented sample does not represent to make unambiguous and indisputable conclusions about the belonging of an egg to a certain class of oviparous animals. "

According to Alexei, he found out how much his find might cost at auctions of paleontologists. He was named the starting cost - from 35 to 70 thousand dollars. But the owner of the stone egg does not want to sell the treasure just like that.

I want to find a sponsor, do research to determine exactly which animal the embryo in the egg belongs to. And then transfer this unique exhibit to some Russian museum. Perhaps Komsomolskaya Pravda will help with this? - Alexey says goodbye, hiding his treasure in a plastic bag. - I contacted scientists from London on the Internet. They are ready to buy an egg from me. But it is much better if this paleontological value remains in Russia.

Scientists have not argued that dinosaurs hatched from eggs for a long time. A lot is also known about the development of a dinosaur inside an egg. But how long did the future dinosaur spend inside the egg? Weeks, a couple of months? Scientists at the University of Florida at Tallahassee believe they've figured it out.

“One of the most important dinosaur mysteries was that paleontologists knew little about the development of embryos. How quickly did the eggs incubate - like crocodiles and lizards, or perhaps birds whose eggs develop very quickly? ”Says Gregory Erickson, one of the study participants.

The question is really interesting, although it was not possible to get an answer to it for a long time. The fact is that scientists have not found so many eggs, which could be used to trace the development of the embryo. Relatively recently, in China, Mongolia and Argentina, paleontologists managed to find several clutches of eggs at once. Studying these fossils has helped to figure out how dinosaurs evolved inside their limestone hideouts.

Plus, we managed to understand how the development of embryos took place in their first days. It is this fact that was made clear by a find in Mongolia. There, scientists found eggs of Protoceratops andrewsi and Hyparhosaurus (Hypacrosaurus stebingeri). Find the so-called embryonic teeth in eggs. By them, you can find out the age of the eggs, since the formation of teeth occurs in layers, by day. Every day, the tooth is covered with another layer of dentin. And if you cut a tooth, it becomes clear what the age of the embryo is.

As it turned out, Protoceratops andrewsi spent about three months in eggs, while Hypacrosaurus stebingeri spent six months or so. Perhaps, scientists say, it is precisely this protracted development that is one of the reasons for the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Scientists have made a few more conclusions after carefully examining all the findings. These are the conclusions.

Dinosaurs could hatch eggs and were partially warm-blooded

Previously, it was believed that dinosaurs laid their eggs somewhere in a secluded place in the warmth and left. Now the opinion of scientists has changed. First, many dinosaur species had the ability to regulate blood temperature. This was found out thanks to the shell material - ordinary calcium carbonate. In the shell, the researchers found oxygen isotopes that are arranged differently in materials depending on temperature. In colder conditions, isotopes are located more closely together, so to speak.

The research team decided that the dinosaurs whose eggs were found were not as warm-blooded as modern birds. But they could raise their body temperature above the average ambient temperature. Not as effective as birds can do it, but still, it's better than nothing.

Not all dinosaurs hatched eggs, and not all were warm-blooded. But now more and more facts indicate that these ancient animals were able to maintain the temperature of the blood and incubate their offspring. Perhaps (and most likely it is), there were completely warm-blooded species.

Adult dinosaurs courted their offspring

Probably, not all dinosaurs did this, but scientists believe that one of the species incubated eggs and then looked after the little successors of the genus. For example, platypus dinosaurs did this. Of course, scientists cannot say for sure, but there is indirect evidence of this. For example, in Montana (USA), a clutch of eggs of duckbill parents was found. The shells of broken eggs were interspersed with the fossilized remains of adults. This place became a common grave for embryos in eggs and their parents. Since there were adults near the nest, scientists decided that the duck-billed dinosaurs were considerate parents.

In addition, there are other similar finds. Back in 1923, a clutch of eggs, presumably protoceratops, was found in the Gobi Desert. Near the masonry, paleontologists discovered the remains of a previously unknown species of dinosaurs. He was considered a thief who pulled eggs from the clutch. The species was even given the name Oviraptor, meaning "the thief of eggs." It was only in 1990 that Oviraptor was acquitted. Scientists have found a clutch of the same eggs with rather mature embryos inside. It turned out that both embryos and adults, whose remains were also found nearby, belonged to the same species - Oviraptor.

It turned out that dinosaurs of this species not only did not steal eggs, but also guarded their own clutches. Moreover, scientists were able to find dinosaurs of a related species, which also guarded their clutches.

Dinosaur egg shells were colorful

It is clear that the eggs different types dinosaurs differed from each other in size, color, surface pattern. So far, blue-green has been recognized as the most unusual color. Eggs of this color were laid by a dinosaur of the Heyuannia huangi species, which once lived in China. Scientists believe that this color could make the clutch more invisible than, for example, a clutch with white eggs. The nests of blue-green eggs were invisible among the foliage and were difficult to spot.

Many clutches were partially buried

The eggs of almost any animal have pores that provide gas exchange with environment... By the nature of the pores, scientists can determine the conditions in which the eggs were found most of the time.

On this moment the eggs of not so many dinosaurs have been found, but even these finds allow us to draw certain conclusions. Thus, the 29 species of dinosaurs whose clutches were found definitely buried their eggs. This can be judged by the size of the pores - the eggs that were buried had larger pores. At the same time, some theropods did nothing of the kind, and laid their eggs in open nests, without covering them with earth or sand.

Paleontologists believe that burying eggs is a more primitive way of raising offspring. And open nests are already a step towards birds and their way of nesting.

It may well be that theropods were warmer-blooded than their older relatives. This allowed them to maintain a constant masonry microclimate due to the temperature of their own bodies. Some dinosaur species could make nests not on the ground in the middle of a forest or plain, but on a tree, in a cave, or on hills.

nest and clutch of therizinosaurus, a theropod dinosaur that lived at the end of the Cretaceous.

Ballista / Wikimedia commons

It seems that not birds, but also theropod dinosaurs began to take care of egg laying, and this began at least 80 million years ago. This conclusion was reached by paleontologists who found fossils of 15 egg clutches, according to Geology, and also in the editorial in Nature... The percentage of hatched chicks, which scientists estimated from shell fragments, was quite high - about 60 percent. This percentage is observed in modern crocodiles or birds that take care of the clutch and protect it from predators.

Communal nesting is characteristic of some modern birds, usually of the same species. In this case, the birds arrange nests close to each other. For example, in the colonies of public weavers ( Philetairus socius) can nest up to 400 pairs of birds. This makes it easier for them to look after the nests, and in case of danger the birds can raise the alarm and warn the neighbors. The fact that some species of dinosaurs had communal nesting was known earlier. So, fossils of joint clutches of dinosaurs were found by paleontologists in Mongolia, in the Late Cretaceous Javkhlant formation. Some reptiles appear to have returned to their nesting sites over the years.

Recently, paleontologists have obtained circumstantial evidence that dinosaurs, like modern birds or crocodiles, protected their nests. Darla Zelenitsky of the University of Calgary and colleagues from four countries have found fossils of at least 15 nests and more than 50 eggs in the Javklant Formation. Scientists have dated them 80 million years ago. Some of the cubs have already hatched and fragments of the shell have been preserved from their eggs. The clutches were made in one season, as evidenced by the thin layer of sedimentary rock that was common to all 15 clutches. Some of the sediment got into the broken eggshells and filled them. The researchers suggested that the nests died when a nearby river flooded. Judging by the fact that some of the eggs were not broken, the flood was small.

Based on the internal and external texture of the eggs and the thickness of the shell, scientists suggested that the nests were made by theropod dinosaurs - a large group of reptiles, which included tyrannosaurs, ceratopsians and oviraptors. By the number of shell fragments, scientists estimated the percentage of hatched cubs. It turned out to be quite high - about 60 percent. About the same number of young birds and crocodiles appear in modern birds, which take care of the nests and drive away predators from them. The authors suggested that it is likely that the theropods who arranged the clutches also took care of them. If this is true, then the defensive behavior first appeared in feathered dinosaurs, and allowed them to increase the offspring's chances of survival.

Perhaps theropods did take care of their nests, agrees UCLA paleontologist Daniel Barta, who was not involved in the study. But it should be borne in mind that eggs broken by predators look very similar to those from which the cubs hatched.

The found clutches, apparently, belonged to not very large dinosaurs, the diameter of the eggs in them reached 10-15 centimeters (for comparison, the diameter of ostrich eggs is 12-15 centimeters), and apparently they incubated them. And recently, paleontologists on the nest of large dinosaurs, and according to its structure, suggested how large dinosaurs warmed the clutch without breaking or crushing the eggs. They probably laid eggs along the perimeter of a large nest, while they themselves sat in the center and warmed them with their sides or limbs.

Ekaterina Rusakova