완전하게 보존된 공룡의 태아, 껍질안에서 생생한 모습으로 발견,

 완전하게 보존된 공룡의 태아, 껍질안에서 생생한 모습으로  발견됐다.  공룡과 새들 사이를 연결하는데, 껍집속에  거의 완전하게 자리를 하고 있는 태아공룡의 지금까지는 한번도 본적이 없는 화석이 발견된것이다. 

7천만년전부터 형성된 화석은, 중국의 박물관에 보관하는 화석의 이름을 '태아 Yingliang'이라 불리는, 공룡의 태아는 새들과 거의 비슷하게 보여지는 형태의 뼈가 화석형태로 보존되여 있었다.  태아공룡의 뼈는 아주 조그맣고 쉽게 부서질 위험이 있고, 매우 드물게 화석형태로 보존되여 있는데, 이런상태의 화석을 발견한것은 운이 좋았기 때문이라고 환호한 캐나다 알버타주의 캘가리 대학의 조교수  Darla Zelenitsky씨가 설명했다. 

아래의 뉴스를 링크해서 자세한 내용을 자세히 이해할수 있다.

A reconstruction of a soon-to-hatch baby dinosaur based on the fossil.

(CNN)An unprecedented fossil of a baby dinosaur curled up perfectly inside its egg is shedding more light on the links between dinosaurs and birds.

The 70-million-year-old fossil preserves the embryonic skeleton of an oviraptorid dinosaur, which has been nicknamed Baby Yingliang after the name of the Chinese museum which houses the fossil. Baby dinosaur bones are small and fragile and are only very rarely preserved as fossils, making this a very lucky find, said Darla Zelenitsky, an associate professor in the department of geoscience at the University of Calgary in Canada.

"It is an amazing specimen ... I have been working on dinosaur eggs for 25 years and have yet to see anything like it," said Zelenitsky, a coauthor of the research that published in the journal iScience on Tuesday.

"Up until now, little has been known of what was going on inside a dinosaur's egg prior to hatching, as there are so few embryonic skeletons, particularly those that are complete and preserved in a life pose," she said in an email.

The egg is around 17 centimeters (7 inches) long and the dinosaur was estimated to be 27 centimeters (11 inches) long from head to tail. The researchers believe as an adult, had it lived, it would have been about two to three meters long.

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The researchers from China, the UK and Canada studied the positions of Baby Yingliang and other previously found oviraptorid embryos. They concluded that the dinosaurs were moving and changing poses before hatching in a way similar to baby birds.

In modern birds, such movements are associated with a behavior called tucking, which is controlled by the central nervous system and is critical for hatching success.

The baby dinosaur's position in the egg was similar to that of modern birds.

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

"We were surprised to see this embryo beautifully preserved inside a dinosaur egg, lying in a bird-like posture. This posture had not been recognized in non-avian dinosaurs before."

An artist's reconstruction of the baby oviraptorid dinosaur.

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

The pre-hatching behavior isn't the only behavior modern birds inherited from their dinosaur ancestors. The same kind of dinosaurs are also known to have sat on top of their eggs to incubate them in a way similar to birds, Zelenitsky said.

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

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/21/asia/baby-dinosaur-inside-egg-scn/index.html