A rare fossil discovery beautifully preserves a pterosaur mother and her egg, offering an extraordinary glimpse into the prehistoric nurturing behaviors and reproductive life of these ancient winged reptiles
Pterosaur parents reproduced more like turtles than birds, according to a new study of a fossilized mother and her egg. The discovery is also the first to allow researchers to conclusively tell the sex of a pterosaur. The fossils were found next to each other in China’s Liaoning Province, once the site of an ancient lake. They appear to belong to a species of pterosaur called Darwinopterus (picture), which lived about 160 million years ago. Scientists think the adult was an expectant pterosaur mother that somehow broke her left wing, causing her to fall into the lake and drown. The body sank to the bottom and eventually expelled the egg. “During the decay process, you get a buildup of gases and pressure inside the carcass, and that tends to expel things out,” said study co-author David Unwin, a paleontologist at the University of Leicester in the U.K. The egg “didn’t go very far. It just came out of the body and sat there.” In addition to the associated egg, the fossil has a...