The first dinosaur egg may be a soft egg

unique, and Mark Norrell, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, has a problem that has not been solved for more than a decade. In 2005, he and his colleagues discovered fossils of the original horned dragon eggs in southern Mongolia, which had the skeletons of young dragons inside, but no one could explain why there was a mysterious white ring on the edge of the egg.
June 18, Nature published two studies that solved two puzzles and pointed to a key conclusion: the eggs produced by early dinosaurs were soft. This also explains why there are so few fossils of eggs in dinosaur specimens - eggs in soft shells are more fragile and difficult to evolve into fossils.
Julia Clark, a palaeontologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and her colleagues worked hard to finally identify the "frustrated football", which is actually an egg fossil of a large undersea predator, the dragon, from 66 million years ago. Looking through a series of microscopes, they confirmed that the folded and fragile outer wall on the specimen was in fact a layered structure of the reptile egg.fossils of giant marine predator dragons. The white ring
found in fossils found by Norrell et al. is also strong evidence of soft-shell eggs. To understand the puzzle, he and his colleagues immersed the fossil sample in a laser to record changes in the interaction of light with the surface of the sample.
team used two sets of fossil samples, one of which was a 7,500-year-old fossil of the original horned dragon egg unearthed in Mongolia, and the other of a 715 million-year-old dragon egg. The molecular fingerprints of modern soft eggshells are different from between hard eggshells, and Norrell et al. have finally confirmed that the white halos on the two fossils are in fact fossilized versions of soft eggshell molecular fingerprints.dragons survived the early days of the dinosaur era. Previous studies have suggested that eggs from early dinosaurs were likely to be soft. The egg fossils of the original horned dragon mean that even in the late dinosaur era, when hard-shelled eggs were present, soft-shelled eggs existed.
last year, researchers at the University of Leicester also found that pter dragons also lay soft shell eggs, and that hatched pter dragon babies can fly immediately. Clark and others point out that baby dragons are likely to hatch within minutes of the soft-shell eggs ingling.
some researchers have pointed out that land dinosaurs will bury soft shell eggs, which may be for safety reasons, after all, tons of adult dinosaurs directly hatched on the eggs, eggs can easily be destroyed. Other researchers say the practice prevents the loss of moisture from eggs. However, this may also cause the egg to develop more slowly at lower temperatures.
these two studies have changed the way dinosaurs grew and bred. Cardo Araujo, a paleontologist at the Technical University of Lisbon, said Norrell et al.'s conclusions were convincing and that their research was a reminder that "we know very little about the diversity of dinosaur breeding strategies." Information
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