Fossil in Focus All About Dinosaur Eggs

welcome today's fossil in Focus we are checking out dinosaur egg cast so this is an egg that shows that it's still in the matrix it's kind of how let's set up Matrix is just talking about the material that's surrounding the fossil and so this is an unidentified egg it's from the Cretaceous so it's about 83 million years old and was found in China now ultimately if you find an egg you're probably like well whose egg is this mean this could be probably an ornithopod Egg but we really don't know what we do know is that all dinosaurs laid eggs they're amniotes and like their closest relatives they they laid eggs but it's very hard to figure out whose eggs is whose when we want to try to learn more about the eggs there's couple things we can do the eggs themselves can be classified into different fossil groups and so to make those identifications of those different types we look at the sizes and the shapes of the different fossil eggs we can also look at the surface we'll look at that under microscope because there are fossil microstructures that are preserved and different types of dinosaur eggs have different characteristic dinosaur or egg structures and so that allows the classification of the eggs into those different fossil groups and but that's it so sometimes we're like well this is this fossil type and that's that we might be able to identify some of the differences based on their shapes but we can't know specifically whose egg is whose unless we get lucky and occasionally we are really lucky and we'll find fossil embryos and they'll be Associated inside of the eggshell I've read stories about you know the eggs were sitting on the shelf and at some point they broke and someone noticed that there was bone inside and so they'll do different analyzes to take look at those fossil embryos and if you can find the bones inside of the egg you can figure out exactly whose egg it belongs to and that's pretty amazing find so it is very lucky most of the time we just find the fossils the eggs themselves sometimes nests and that can help us start to understand the lifestyles of the different dinosaur groups that were alive during during the Mesozoic so that is our quick look at this dinosaur egg in Matrix with that that ends our fossil in Focus until next time Wish You Adventure and happy learning