New Scientist
Image: Bart Hanlon
From chocolate brown to brick red, emerald green to turquoise blue, bird eggs come in an astonishing variety of colours. And it all began with one dinosaur alive tens of millions of years ago, according to a new analysis that concludes colourful eggs evolved just once.
Many living animals lay eggs, but only birds lay colourful ones. As such, biologists used to assume that colourful eggs are a bird innovation.
But in 2015, Jasmina Wiemann, now at Yale University, and her colleagues discovered pigment molecules in 66-million-year-old dinosaur eggs. The eggs were blueish-green and were probably laid by some type of oviraptor, a bipedal dinosaur that’s a close relative of modern day birds.
Now, the team has examined more dinosaur eggs. They have found evidence that seven more dinosaurs produced colourful eggs – again mostly blue-green. Read more on newscientist.com…
