Scientists have said, where is the color of the eggs of birds

Paleontologists have discovered that the pigmented eggs of the dinosaurs of the entire group to which they belong, the birds of today.

People who are used to seeing the eggs alone in the hen, it is difficult to imagine how their color differs from that of other birds, chocolate brown to emerald green, brick red to bright blue. And there was that long before the diversity of birds – with a single mutation that appeared in the dinosaurs millions of years ago. In an article published in the journal Nature, scientists reveal the details of this important event.

In fact, lay a lot of animals, but different color only occurs in birds. Therefore, until now, it was thought that this adaptation came from the representatives of this group. On the other hand, recent discoveries suggest that dinosaurs could lay eggs of different colors. In particular, Jasmine Wiman (Jasmina Wiemann) and her colleagues discovered a 70-million-year-old fossilized egg of the oviraptorid age; biliverdin is a pigment that gives them a blue-green color. Brown-red protoporphyrin was later found: it is a combination of the two key pigments that create all the egg color options in birds.

In the new work of the same team of researchers covered a much larger material of 19 species of dinosaurs and reptiles and modern birds. Biliverdine could be found in the remains of seven different dinosaur eggs. They all belong to the Eumaniraptora group, which will include modern birds. Attempts to detect color traces in dinosaur eggs and other groups were unsuccessful: they were all apparently white. Scientists believe that this indicates the appearance of colors in the Eumaniraptora clade at the early stages of its evolutionary development, when division into subgroups has not yet occurred.

Most likely, it was a single event, even an uncertain mutation, that caused an accumulation of biliverdin in the shell and created the eggs for the beginning of blue-green. On the other hand, causes a fixation of this mutation call is difficult. Perhaps bright colors make it easy to find eggs in thick grasses or help distinguish them from eggs planted with "brood pests" like the modern cuckoo.