Dinosaur egg found in Madhya Pradesh!
An ‘egg-in-egg’ dinosaur egg was discovered on a field trip by a Delhi University research team in Madhya Pradesh. It is most likely the first-of-its-kind discovery in the history of fossils. The new results also show that central and western India have a lot of dinosaur fossils, which might reveal a lot about dinosaur oospecies variety, nesting behaviour, and other things.
The discovery is a “rare and important find” because no ‘ovum-in-ovo’ egg (dinosaur egg) has been found in reptiles before, according to the study, which also stated that “this could provide important insights into whether dinosaurs had reproductive biology similar to that of turtles and lizards, or crocodiles and birds, etc.”
Dinosaur fossils have been discovered in the Upper Cretaceous Lametta Formation, which spans 5,000 kilometres across West and Central India. Near Padlya hamlet, near Bagh town, the authors discovered a huge number of titanosaurid sauropod nests. One ‘abnormal egg’ was discovered by the researchers.
The researchers discovered a sauropod dinosaur nest with ten eggs, one of which was odd. Their statement highlighted “two continuous and circular eggshell layers separated by a broad gap typical of ovum-in-ovo (one egg within another egg) disease in birds.”
The diseased egg’s microstructure, as well as that of a nearby egg in the same nest, matched that of titanosaurid sauropod dinosaurs. It added that until now, no egg-in-egg aberrant fossil egg had been discovered in dinosaurs or other reptiles like turtles, lizards, or crocodiles.
Several studies have already shown that dinosaurs had a reproductive function comparable to that of turtles and other reptiles, as opposed to crocodiles and birds, who had a segmented reproductive system. “The discovery of an ovum-in-ovo egg from a titanosaurid nest raises the possibility that sauropod dinosaurs had oviduct morphology similar to that of crocodiles or birds, and they may have adapted to a mode of the egg-laying characteristic of birds,” said DU researcher Dr Harsha Dhiman, the paper’s lead author.
