Birds need colorful eggs to parents of dinosaurs

Blue-green for the blackbird, light brown for the chicken, black speckled for the lapwing: the birds' eggs have different colors and patterns. This distinguishes them from reptile eggs – they always have a white bowl. Yet, the colorful eggshell is not a "bird innovation," write three biologists in Nature . Last year, senior researcher Jasmina Wiemann of the Yale American University published an article in Peer J in which she had established that dinosaurs were also laying red-brown and blue eggs -vert there are millions of years. This has led to the question of whether the current birds owe their colorful egg shells to their parents dinosaurs or whether this egg color has evolved twice separately. years ago), partly from their current living relatives, such as chicken and alligator. With the aid of a microspectroscopy, they established the presence of pigment in all dinosaur eggshells classified as "eumaniraptora". These eumaniraptora belong to theropods, a large group of feathered, carnivorous and two-legged dinosaurs. The current birds are also eumaniraptora. This means that all colored eggs have a common evolution. In dinosaur eggs not belonging to theropods (sauropods for example, as the diplodocus 'langnekdino'), there were no colors . the red-brown protoporphyrin (found in the outer wax layer) and the blue-green biliverdin (which penetrates deeper into the shell). The fossil eggs were not uniform in color, but spotted or mottled (thanks to protoporphyrin).