Palaeontologists working in China have unearthed the earliest collection of fossilized dinosaur embryos to date. The trove includes remains from many individuals at different developmental stages, providing a unique opportunity to investigate the embryonic development of a prehistoric species.
Robert Reisz, a palaeontologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, Canada, and his colleagues discovered the sauropodomorph fossils in a bone bed in Lufeng County that dates to the Early Jurassic period, 197 million to 190 million years ago. The site contained eggshells and more than 200 disarticulated bones — the oldest known traces of budding dinosaurs, the researchers report online today in Nature1.
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