Word: eggs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Norell of New York City's American Museum of Natural History found the nearly complete skeleton of a predatory-dinosaur embryo, the first ever discovered, fossilized just as it was about to hatch during the Cretaceous period, more than 70 million years ago. The embryo and its potato-size egg, found in a rocky nest along with at least eight other eggs, are from a kind of oviraptor, an ostrich-size cousin of both tyrannosaurs and velociraptors. And several aspects of the discovery make the parallels between dinosaurs and birds stronger than ever...
...start with, says Norell, the eggs he found are identical to eggs uncovered in 1923, also in the Gobi, by the famed fossil hunter Roy Chapman Andrews. Most of the bones in the area Andrews explored belonged to a vegetarian dinosaur called Protoceratops, so Andrews thought the eggs did too. Since a predator's remains were found lying on top of one clutch of eggs, scientists assumed that it had died in the act of eating them and named it Oviraptor, or egg stealer. But Norell's discovery makes it clear that the unfairly maligned "thief" was more likely...
Another clue to the monster's motherly instincts may come from two tiny skulls that Norell found in the nest. They belong to a different type of predatory dinosaur known as dromaeosaurs. While they could have been egg stealers themselves, they could also have been brought in by the mother oviraptor as food. Or they might have emerged from eggs sneaked into the nest by a mother dromaeosaur so her young could be raised by unsuspecting surrogate parents -- a strategy used by modern cuckoos...
...actually the fourth human born from an egg matured outside the ovary. In 1991, Dr. Kwang Yul Cha and his colleagues at the Cha Woman's Hospital in Seoul removed the ovaries of a woman with fibroid tumors and isolated immature eggs, which were then ripened and fertilized in the lab. They transferred the embryos to a surrogate mother, who produced triplets. Since then Cha has not repeated his success...
...meanwhile if you're feeling particularly spiteful toward an old professor or especially eager to exact revenge on an administrator, there's always the old stuff-the-gooey-egg-in-the-mailbox bit. And when you see them earnestly pontificating in Monday's lecture, you can picture their look of shock when they open their mailbox the next morning...