70-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Sitting On A Nest Of Eggs Found In China (Photos)

The fossilised remains of a dinosaur sitting on a nest of eggs, complete with embryos preserved inside, have been unearthed from China, a study has reported.

The find — a world first — is an oviraptorosaur, one of a group of bird-like, theropod dinosaurs that thrived from 130–66 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period.

According to the experts, the specimen was found in 70 million-year-old rocks excavated near the railway station in Ganzhou city, in Jiangxi Province.

The person oviraptorosaur became in part preserved brooding over the grab of as a minimum 24 eggs, at least seven of which include skeletal stays of the unhatched young.

The past due-degree development of the embryos allowed the palaeontologists to rule out the opportunity that the adult had died while laying its eggs.

Instead, the locate shows oviraptorosaurs incubated their nests like their modern-day fowl cousins — in place of simply guarding them within the manner of a crocodile.

This was supported by means of oxygen isotope analyses of the eggs, which indicated that they have been incubated at high temperatures much like modern birds' eggs.

'This kind of discovery — in essence fossilised behaviour — is the rarest of the uncommon in dinosaurs,' said paper creator and vertebrate palaeontologist Matthew Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

'Though some adult oviraptorids were observed on nests in their eggs earlier than, no embryos have ever been located internal the ones eggs.

'In the brand new specimen, the babies were nearly geared up to hatch, which tells us past a doubt that this oviraptorid had tended its nest for quite a long time.

'This dinosaur turned into a caring figure that in the end gave its existence while nurturing its young,' he concluded.

Analysis of the fossil embryos found out that, at the same time as all have been well-advanced, a few had reached a more mature degree than others, suggesting that had they now not been buried and fossilised, they might possibly have hatched at barely extraordinary times.

This feature — which experts dub 'asynchronous hatching' — appears to have advanced independently in oviraptorid dinosaurs and a few cutting-edge birds, the researchers defined.

The crew additionally observed a cluster of pebbles preserved inside the grownup oviraptorid's stomach area, which they said are gastroliths, or 'belly stones', which would have been swallowed to help the dinosaur digest its meals.

This is the primary time that proven gastroliths have been determined preserved in a fossilised oviraptorid and for this reason may result in new insights about their diets.

'It's excellent to assume how tons organic data is captured in only this single fossil,' stated vertebrate palaeontologist Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

'We're going to be learning from this specimen for decades to come,' he introduced.