PBS Eons

Some egg-citing dinosaur news!

Added 2020-06-17 16:57:34 +0000 UTC

Hi Patrons!

Darcy here - I'm the content manager for Eons, which mostly means I research, write, and edit scripts, and work with our freelancers on their scripts.

I'll be posting from time to time about exciting paleo news and fresh research.

Today's news is all about dinosaur eggs, which we covered a bit in our episode "How the Egg Came First."

Now, most of the dinosaur eggs that have been found come from the Cretaceous Period and had hard shells, like the eggs of modern birds and crocs. But paleontologists have been puzzled by the fact that the eggshells from different groups of dinosaurs have different microstructures, which you wouldn't necessarily expect if the hard-shelled egg had a single evolutionary origin. The authors of the new paper suggest that, actually, hard-shelled eggs might have evolved independently in different groups of dinosaurs at least three different times! It also means that the reason we don't find many eggshells from before the Cretaceous is because the eggs of those dinos were probably soft-shelled.

For more info, check out Nature's write-up here.