Author: Carolyn Gramling / Source: Science News for Students
Birds keep their eggs warm by sitting squarely atop them. This is true from chickadees to ostriches. But ancestors of today’s birds include some hefty dinosaurs. Scientists thought dinosaurs might not be able to sit on their eggs without crushing them.
In fact, certain heavy dinos had a clever brooding strategy. They sat in an open space at the center of a ring of eggs, rather than right smack on top of them, new data show.The researchers studied about three dozen groups of fossilized dino eggs. A group of eggs laid together is known as a clutch. Those in this study belonged to different species of oviraptorosaurs (Oh-vih-rap-TOR-uh-sors). These were toothless, feathered dinosaurs that descended from meat-eaters.
Some fossilized egg clutches were laid in a donut shape, with a hole in the middle. Clutches laid by larger oviraptorosaur species had the largest openings at the center. Kohei Tanaka is a paleontologist at…
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