Dinosaur Eggs

Dinosaur Eggs and Nesting

The typical image of a dinosaur "birth" to most people is a single gigantic sized egg, maybe green or yellow in color with some dark shading, cracking open to reveal a pint-sized dinosaur ready for the hunt. This image has been reinforced by media portrayals in television and the movies but scientific research and discovery has proved it to be nothing more than a myth. The largest dinosaur eggs ever found were hardly as big as a football, and adult dinosaurs may have been a more important part of their offspring's lives than normally thought.   The interactions of the shape and size of an egg, the eggshell structure, nest structure and egg distribution, and the nesting behavior of adult dinosaurs, and the environmental conditions were vital to the healthy development of the dinosaur embryos.
There seems to be a classification system for almost everything in the scientific world, and dinosaur eggs are no exception. There have been many changes, variations, and designers of the system over time, some delineating by shape while others rely on the different crystalline structures of the shells. However, there is no universal parataxonomic system for classifying dinosaur eggs, and this leads to confusion when each paleontologist works within the boundaries of whatever system he has chosen to use (Website).
When examining the dinosaur egg itself, there are three aspects that need to be taken into consideration; the structure of the shell, the size, and the shape.
The eggshell may be the most complex aspect of the physical egg itself. The thin shell is covered in pores, and their size and number determine the amount of gases that can be exchanged into the egg and out, mainly O2, CO2, and water vapor. This "exchange capability" is 8 to16x that of present day bird eggshells and suggests a humid environment of low oxygen and high carbon dioxide (Paleobiology, p 42). The texture of dinosaur eggs also varies from smooth to nodular, ridged,... [continues]

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