Paleontology got its start as a science beginning in the mid-19th century when researchers in Britain found dinosaur bones for the first time. Plenty of bones had been found before – remember the stories? – but either there were no records or the records were lost.
Experts theorized that the creatures reproduced similarly to modern-day reptiles, but it wasn’t until the year 1859 when the first fossilized dinosaur eggs were found. They allowed researchers to study the life cycle in greater detail.
Erickson and his team took the fossilized eggs and inspected the embryos preserved inside, and other fossilized embryos of different dinosaur species. Thanks to advancing technology, they were able to come to some fascinating conclusions about how dinosaurs lived, grew, and reproduced.
To their surprise, their discoveries could also help us learn more about the big extinction events that changed the world and nature enough to wipe dinosaurs off the planet more than once.
Dinosaur fossils have always been an intense field of study, ever since paleontology really got started as a science. We got Greek myths such as the Cyclops from them, Medieval tales about dragons and other huge beasts, and plenty of incredible media thanks to these amazing discoveries.
As science and technology improve, we're able to learn more and more about these remains. A lot of people think that we're able to learn the most from full-formed and fully-grown specimens, preserved in rock, but there are lots of other ways to learn more about these incredible beasts.
The first fossilized dino eggs appeared in France and were at first thought to have belonged to an unknown species of birds (that's a little bit of foreshadowing). This led to them being overlooked for a long time, but sixty-four years later researchers took another look and correctly re-categorized them as dinosaur eggs.
This leads us back to the American Museum of Natural History, which provided the researchers that did the work in Mongolia. Thanks to this refocused study, our knowledge about dinosaurs, eggs, and plenty of other things have grown by leaps and bounds.
Once the researchers discovered the French eggs were, in fact, from dinosaurs, more and more started to pop up as other researchers went back to them and started studying them again. It led to lots of questions about the creatures that had laid – and inhabited – the eggs.
A few of the fossils that have popped up are empty – they successfully hatched, and lived out their lives away from their eggs. A few, however, told a different story, one that had life cut short before they could breathe their first breath. In rare cases, the creatures inside are perfectly preserved.