A rare dinosaur embryo, perfectly preserved in the egg and fossilized in a position that until now was thought to be typical only of birds about to be born, was discovered in southern China: the specimen, renamed "Baby Yingliang", is an oviraptosaurus (a "relative" theropod of birds) lived about 70 million years ago.

His identikit is published in the iScience magazine by an international team led by the University of Birmingham and the Chinese University of Geosciences in Beijing.

"Most of the dinosaur embryos are incomplete with the disjointed skeletons: we were very surprised to see this embryo perfectly preserved in its egg, in a posture similar to that of birds. It is something that has never been seen so far in non-dinosaurs. aviani ", comments Waisum Ma of the University of Birmingham.

Baby Yingliang is 27cm long from head to tail and sits inside a 17cm egg. Its head is folded under the belly, flanked by the legs, while the back follows the curvature of the shell.

"It looks like a small bird curled up in its egg, further proof that many features of modern birds first evolved in their ancestors dinosaurs," explains Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh. The fossil, recovered in Jiangxi province near Ganzhou city, was acquired in 2000 by the director of a company called Yingliang Group, but then ended up in a warehouse where it was recovered only a decade ago by the staff of Yingliang Stone. Nature History Museum in Xiamen, where it is still preserved today.

(Unioneonline / vl)