The specimen, renamed “Baby Yingliang”, is an oviraptosaurus (a relative of theropod birds) that lived about 70 million years ago.
“more than Incomplete dinosaur embryos with disjointed skeletons: We were very surprised to see this embryo perfectly preserved in its egg, in a position similar to that of a bird. It’s something that has never been seen before in dinosaurs other than birds,” comments Waisum Ma of the University of Birmingham.
Baby Yingliang is 27cm tall From head to tail and inside an egg 17 cm. Its head is bent under the abdomen, legs are surrounded by it, while the back follows the curvature of the shell. “It looks like a little bird curled up in its own egg, and this is further evidence that many of the traits of modern birds first evolved in their ancestral dinosaurs,” explains Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh.
Fossil He recovered in Jiangxi Province, near Ganzhou cityIt was acquired in 2000 by a director of a company called Yingliang Group, but ended up in a warehouse where it was recovered just a decade earlier by staff of the Yingliang Stone Museum of Natural History in Xiamen, where it is still preserved today.
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