Fossil turtle hatching. Credit: Artwork copyright Masato Mattori
Phys.org has a story about the discovery of a turtle embryo in a fossilized egg. The fossil egg was found in China's Henan Province and dates to the Cretaceous Period. The egg was described in a paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China and Canada has identified a turtle egg fossil from the Cretaceous period that contains an embryo. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes where the egg was found and what they learned about it during their examination.
Finding the eggs of dinosaurs or turtles from the Cretaceous period is extremely rare—their fragile nature makes it difficult for them to survive to the present, even in prime conditions. Finding a fossilized embryo still inside such an egg is even more rare. But that is just what the team in China discovered when they visited a farmer in China's Henan Province. He had inadvertently dug up what he had described as several strange-looking rocks. One of those rocks turned out to be a turtle egg that the team dated to a time during the Cretaceous period, somewhere between 66 and 145 million years ago.
