Newly Hatched Dinosaur Babies Hit the Ground Running

摘要

Therizinosauroid dinosaurs grew up fast. When they chipped their way out of an egg, the animals emerged strong-legged, ready to fend for themselves and find food, according to an analysis of 80-mil-lion-year-old fossil dinosaur eggs conducted by a team of paleontologists and developmental biologists. For the past 6 years, Arthur Cruickshank of the University of Leicester, U.K., Martin Kundrat of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and their colleagues have studied the jumbles of bones an teeth packed into a dozen fossil eggs found in Henan Province, in east-central China. The teeth and bones allowed them to identify the fossils as theizinosauroid, Kundrat reported.