They discover a perfectly preserved baby dinosaur nestled inside its egg

(CNN) – The fossil of a baby dinosaur nestled perfectly inside its egg – something never seen before – sheds some light on the links between dinosaurs and birds.

The 70-million-year-old fossil preserves the embryonic skeleton of an oviraptor dinosaur, which has been called Baby Yingliang after the Chinese museum that houses it. Baby dinosaur bones are so small and fragile that they are rarely preserved as fossils. So this is a very lucky finding, said Darla Zelenitsky, associate professor in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Calgary in Canada.

This is a reconstruction of the baby dinosaur based on the fossil.

“It is an incredible specimen … I have been working on dinosaur eggs for 25 years and I have not seen anything like it,” explained Zelenitsky, a co-author of the research published by the magazine. iScience this Tuesday.

“Until now, very little was known about what happened inside the egg of a dinosaur before hatching, since there are very few embryonic skeletons. Especially, those that are complete and preserved in a life position,” he explained in an email electronic.

This baby dinosaur gives a lot of clues about modern birds

The egg is about 17 centimeters long and the dinosaur is estimated to be 27 centimeters long from head to tail. Researchers believe that as an adult, if it had lived, it would have been between two and three meters long.

Researchers from China, the UK and Canada studied the positions of Baby Yingliang and other previously found oviraptor embryos. They concluded that dinosaurs moved and changed posture before being born, in a manner similar to baby birds.

In modern birds, such movements are associated with a behavior called folding. Which controls the central nervous system and is essential for hatching success.

The position of the baby dinosaur in the egg is similar to that of modern birds.

“Most of the known non-avian dinosaur embryos are incomplete, with disarticulated skeletons (separate bones in the joints),” said Waisum Ma, lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of Birmingham, UK, in a statement.

“We were surprised to see this beautifully preserved embryo inside a dinosaur egg, lying in a bird pose. This pose had not been recognized before in non-avian dinosaurs,” he added.

This is an artist’s reconstruction of the baby oviraptor dinosaur.

The fossil was forgotten for many decades

All birds evolved directly from a group of two-legged dinosaurs known as theropods. Its members include the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex and the smaller velociraptors.

Pre-hatching behavior is not the only behavior that modern birds inherited from their dinosaur ancestors. The same types of dinosaurs are also known to sit on their eggs to hatch them in a similar way to birds, Zelenitsky said.

The fossil was discovered in China’s Jiangxi province and acquired in 2000 by Liang Liu, director of a Chinese stone company called the Yingliang Group. It ended up in storage, largely forgotten until about 10 years later, when museum staff sorted the boxes and unearthed the fossil during the construction of the Yingliang Stone Museum of Natural History. The museum is subsidized by the company.