Hard news: Early dinosaur eggs were soft, scientists say

A fossil of a Mussaurus egg - The first dinosaur eggs had a soft shell, say paleontologists from Yale and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The finding upends decades of conventional wisdom by the scientific community. For many years there was scant fossil evidence of dinosaur eggs, and all known examples were characterized by thick, calcified shells - leading paleontologists to speculate that all dinosaur eggs were hard-shelled, like those of modern crocodiles and birds. In a new study published , researchers used a novel geochemical approach to show that the earliest dinosaur eggs had soft, leathery shells. Yale paleontologists Jasmina Wiemann and Matteo Fabbri are co-corresponding authors of the study, along with first author Mark Norell of AMNH. The researchers analyzed new, embryo-bearing egg fossils ascribed to the dinosaurs  Protoceratops  and  Mussaurus . The  Protoceratops  eggs are the first ever discovered for a horned dinosaur, while the  Mussaurus  eggs represent some of the earliest for a long-necked dinosaur.