Dinosaurs put the colour in bird eggs

摘要

BIRD eggs come in an astonishing range of colours. And this variety all began with one dinosaur tens of millions of years ago. Many modern animals lay eggs, but only birds lay colourful ones. As such, we used to assume that colourful eggs were a bird innovation. But in 2015, Jasmina Wiemann, now at Yale University, and her colleagues discovered pigment in 66 million-year-old dinosaur eggs. They were blueish-green and probably laid by a type of oviraptor, a bipedal dinosaur that is a close relative of modern birds.