Scientists eggs-tremely egg-cited about the discovery of pterosaur dinosaur eggs


Several hundred very well-preserved dinosaur eggs have been found in China – some of them still containing the remains of embryos. Is Jurassic Park just around the corner?


Hundreds of pterosaur eggs have been found in a desert in China
Photo: Xinhua



“My first thought was extreme jealousy,” said David Unwin, a pterosaur expert and palaeobiologist at the University of Leicester in England. “Really.”

To understand why Unwin and others are freaking out about the discovery, published on Thursday in the journal Science, you have to first appreciate how rare pterosaur eggs are.

Artificial biodegradable skin, water rockets and other cool things Hong Kong students made and showed off at the DSS STEM fair

The pterosaurs were an order of flying reptiles that went extinct some 66 million years ago. They were not actually dinosaurs, but they went extinct at the same time. Along with bats and birds, they are the only vertebrates to truly fly. And though these creatures took over the skies for around 162 million years, only a handful of pterosaur egg fossils have ever been unearthed. And of those, palaeontologists have just six three-dimensional eggs – that is, eggs not completely flattened by millions of years of being crushed under younger sediments.

But now, we have a pterosaur egg extravaganza. According to the new research, a site in China’s Turpan-Hami Basin in Xinjiang has unearthed 215 beautiful and miraculously three-dimensional eggs – 16 of which contain embryonic remains. The researchers also suspect there could be as many as 300 more eggs within the same sandstone block. No wonder Xiaolin Wang, the study’s lead author and a palaeontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the discovery could be described as a sort of “pterosaur Eden”.

If Jurassic Park were real, would you visit it?

Aside from breaking records, Unwin said there are practical reasons for why having more eggs is better. “When you have a really unique find, you basically can’t do anything to it because that’s all you’ve got.” But now that we have literally hundreds of eggs to work with, we have more options – such as cutting different eggs into cross-sections to study growth rates.

What’s more, the egg treasure trove also boasts skeletons from what appear to be hatchlings, juveniles and adults. This, too, is an embarrassment of riches because it means scientists now have more information about how pterosaurs progressed from egg to adult than ever before.


And Kellner isn’t some newbie to pterosaur discoveries. He’s been studying these ancient animals for more than 30 years and has personally been a part of naming or describing more than 20 species. This includes the species in question, Hamipterus tianshanensis, which Kellner, Wang and a team of their colleagues discovered in 2014.


Probably a fish-eater, H. tianshanensis inhabited hot and dry environments but would have buried its eggs in the sand and vegetation found on the shores of lakes or rivers. This is also likely why so many eggs have been found together. Kellner suspects recent storms caused torrential flooding which unearthed the eggs and washed them into the fossil record, along with other, older pterosaurs that fell victim to the flood.

The real Jurassic dinos: Is it a dinosaur or a bird?


The paper says that H. tianshanensis hatchlings wouldn’t have been able to fly immediately because several of the eggs the team examined showed wing bones that were less developed than expected. This may have meant that baby pterosaurs would have spent some time on the ground hunting insects and generally trying not to be eaten before learning how to take wing. Kellner even speculated that the pterosaur females and maybe even males would have stuck around to feed the hatchlings to help get them through such a precarious stage.


The fiercest dinosaur to ever walk the Earth was ... fluffy?






“And while it’s wonderful to have those, they’re not much different from hatchlings really,” he said. “So I think these new embryonic finds are really exciting because with these, we can begin to reconstruct the embryonic development of pterosaurs inside the egg. I just think it’ll take time to do that.”

Hundreds of pterosaur eggs in one place is impressive, but Unwin said we’d need more evidence to demonstrate another suggestion in the paper: that this species of pterosaur was a communal nester, like penguins. Instead, Unwin thinks it more likely that a bunch of female pterosaurs simply laid their eggs in the same general area, like female sea turtles returning to the same beaches year after year.

7 Earth-size worlds found orbiting star and they could hold alien life forms!


“Pterosaurs are incredibly diverse, not just in the shape but also in sizes,” said Chiappe, who was part of a team that described a 100-million-year-old pterosaur egg in central Argentina in 2004.


Pterosaurs were the very first animals with backbones to master powered flight, Kellner said. How they did what they did, and did it for as long as they did, is just one of the mysteries he and his colleagues hope to solve.

Edited by Nicole Moraleda


To post comments please
register or