Illustration of Beibeilong embryo and egg fossil, with reconstruction of skeleton and fleshed-out models to the right. (Image by Zhao Chuang)
The identity of a dinosaur found in a huge egg clutch in China in the 1990s is described in a new paper. The embryo became known in the paleontology community as “Baby Louie”; it’s now identified as a new species of bird-like oviraptorosaur. The species has been named Beibeilong sinensis, which translates as “Chinese baby dragon”, and the name couldn’t be more accurate: while the fossilized embryo is only about 38 centimetres long, researchers estimate an adult B. sinensis to grow up to weigh over one tonne. The ring-shaped clutch where Baby Louie was found made up a nest that was about 2-3 meters in diameter and probably contained over two dozen eggs. Each egg was up to 40 centimetres long and weighed about 5 kilograms, making them some of the largest dinosaur eggs ever discovered. Study authors describe the new giant oviraptorosaur species as the largest known dinosaur to have sat on its nest and cared for its young.
Authors:
Hanyong Pu, Darla K. Zelenitsky, Junchang Lü, Philip J. Currie, Kenneth Carpenter, Li Xu, Eva B. Koppelhus, Songhai Jia, Le Xiao, Huali Chuang, Tianran Li, Martin Kundrát & Caizhi Shen
Corresponding author:
Dr. Darla Zelenitsky, University of Calgary, AB, Email: dkzeleni@ucalgary.ca
Original paper published in Nature Communications on May 9, 2017.
