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    Home > Food News > Food Articles > Bird-colored eggshells may have originated 150 million years ago

    Bird-colored eggshells may have originated 150 million years ago

    • Last Update: 2021-03-15
    • Source: Internet
    • Author: User
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    is a dinosaur egg?
    photo source: JASMINA WIEMANN
    Since ancient times, bird eggs have received many compliments for their diversity of colors and speckled styles, such as the blue-blue eggs of The Better Birds of America and theof dark green eggs. But did you know that these colors and styles on bird eggs may have originated 150 million years ago?
    , most experts believed that the colored eggs of various birds had only recently evolved, and that the earliest birds produced pure white eggs like crocodiles. Mark Hauber, an ornitholic scholar at the University of Illinois who studies egg evolution and hatching behavior, said.
    , Jasmina Wiemann, a molecular palaeontologist at Yale University, first published evidence of color in dinosaur eggs. Using chemical analysis, she detected two pigments, blue-green and brown-red, in a 70 million-year-old river-source dragon egg. To find out if colored dinosaur eggs had the same evolutionary origins as bird eggs, Wiemann and her colleagues collected fragments of eggshells, including Cretaceous dinosaurs, extinct birds, and eggshell fragments of chickens, gulls,and alligators.
    , they did not use the chemical detection method used in 2017, but instead used a new method of study, Raman microwave spectroscopy. Instead of destroying fossils, the method uses laser beams to explore their molecular composition, allowing them to see if they carry two pigment traces commonly found in modern colored eggshells.
    team found that fossil eggshells have many color and spotting patterns, such as blue-green dinosaur eggs from claw dragons and blue-green eggshells from China's Heyuan dragons. In addition, they found that many carnivorous dinosaurs closely related to birds produced colored dinosaur eggs, and that their eggshells were pigmented in the same way, meaning that colored eggshells existed before modern bird branches evolved, most likely more than 150 million years old.
    Wiemann says the colored shell may be able to disguise dinosaur eggs and now bird eggs to avoid predators, and the distinctive speckled pattern may help their parents separate them from the eggs of dinosaur nest parasitics. But now birds that lay white eggs, such as ostrich, parrots and some home-owned chickens, must have lost the ability to color their eggs during evolution. By the same toe, the coloring ability of dinosaur eggs probably evolved to avoid predators.
    , however, the researchers found no evidence of pigmentation in fossils of herbivorous long-necked dinosaur species and the dinosaur eggs of mother-in-law dragons. This suggests that these dinosaur species produced white dinosaur eggs, and that these species are more distant branches of the dinosaur genealogy, burying eggs underground like modern tortoises.
    Wiemann plans to increase the sample size in future studies to see if it is possible to pinpoint exactly where and when the colored eggshells of carnivorous dinosaurs first appeared, and what colors first appeared.
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