thick-shelled turtle egguf with embryo still within the Cretaceous period found in China

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China and Canada have identified a Cretaceous turtle egg fossil that contains an embryo. In their article published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes where the egg was found and what they learned from it during their examination.

Finding Cretaceous dinosaur or turtle eggs is extremely rare – their fragile nature makes it difficult for them to survive to this day, even under ideal conditions. Finding a fossilized embryo still inside such an egg is even rarer. But that’s exactly what the team in China discovered when they visited a farmer in China’s Henan Province. He had inadvertently dug up what he had described as several odd-looking boulders. One of those rocks turned out to be a turtle egg that the team dated to the Cretaceous, between 66 and 145 million years ago.

By studying the egg using various techniques, including computed tomography, the researchers were able to see that the egg came from a turtle that had belonged to a group known as nanhsiungchelyids, a terrestrial species wiped out by the same impact. who wiped out the dinosaurs. Previous research has shown that they are all quite tall. The specimen that laid the egg found by the farmer probably had a shell diameter of up to a meter and a half. To learn more about its characteristics, the researchers recreated the embryo with a 3D software application. In doing so, they found flat ribs characteristic of modern baby turtles. As the turtle grows, they form the base of the shell. Researchers suggest that the ancient turtle was probably not much different from modern turtles, with one exception: an extremely thick eggshell.

As a rule, eggshells are quite thin, whether they come from birds or turtles. This is because the little creature that grows inside has to come out at some point. With a shell nearly two millimeters thick, the baby inside the ancient egg would have required special abilities to make its way through the world.

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