Your Easter egg just might hatch

... a dinosaur?

By: Aimee Bachelder

This may be a simple question, but any parent trying to provide an answer this Easter might struggle to come up with a satisfactory response," Mark Purnell, a researcher at the University of Leicester, said in a statement. "According to many, the eggs are delivered by the Easter Bunny, but that doesn't really address the question: Where does the Easter Bunny get them from?"

Where do Easter eggs come from?

The research started as an analysis of a newly discovered 70-million-year-old egg, one that would've been laid by a mother dinosaur during the Late Cretaceous when Tyrannosaurus rex walked the earth.

To figure out if the egg belonged to an ancient bird or its dinosaur relatives, the team compared the shapes of eggs from birds and dinosaurs.

70 million year old egg?

Dinosaur Eggs vs. Birds Eggs vs. Easter Eggs?

The pale gray eggs are from birds, and the darker gray eggs are from dinosaurs. Most Easter eggs, as shown on the right, are similar in shape to bird's eggs, but some are closer to the eggs of dinosaurs. The Easter egg on the left is particularly close to the newly described Sankofa dinosaur egg.

They found the new Sankofa egg fell somewhere between dinosaur eggs and bird eggs. It's oval-shaped than teardrop-shaped. There are no other eggs like it, the researchers said.

Conclusions

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46986168/ns/technology_and_science-science/

Sources