A multinational team including three Carnegie Museum of Natural History researchers announced a first for the world of paleontology: a dinosaur preserved sitting atop a nest of its own eggs that include fossilized babies inside.

The fossil consists of an incomplete skeleton of a large, adult oviraptorid crouched in a bird-like brooding posture over a clutch of at least 24 eggs.

It’s not the first time a dinosaur sitting atop a nest of its own eggs has been found, but it is the first time a dinosaur has been found sitting atop a nest of its own eggs in which the eggs definitely contain embryos.

How do the researchers know this?

“It’s conceivable that in some of those cases, there were embryos inside but you can’t ever determine that unless the eggs are broken open and ours was the first time it’s been definitely documented,” said Carnegie Museum of Natural History co-interim director and lead dinosaur paleontologist Matt Lamanna, who is part of the research team.

The fossil is that of an oviraptorosaur, a group of bird-like dinosaurs that lived during the Mesozoic Era (known as the Age of Dinosaurs). The new specimen was found in Ganzhou City in southern China’s Jiangxi Province. It is believed to be some 70 million years old.

“The cool thing about finding a dinosaur atop a nest of eggs that contains almost-ready-to-hatch embryos is that it shows definitively that the animal had sat on its nest for a very long time, that it brooded its nest like a modern bird,” Lamanna said.

“So, in my mind there is no doubt now these dinosaurs incubated their nests like birds. This discovery is the final piece of that puzzle.”

The scientific paper describing the discovery was published recently in the journal Science Bulletin. The primary authors are Indiana University of Pennsylvania professor Shundong Bi (who is also a research associate at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History) and Xing Xu, a paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.

Another interesting aspect of the new oviraptorid specimen is evidence of a cluster of pebbles believed to be gastroliths or “stomach stones,” rocks that would have been deliberately swallowed by the dinosaur to help digest its food. It’s the first time these stones have been found in an oviraptorid and may provide new information about the animal’s diet.

“When I first saw this fossil I (said) ‘Oh, this is stunning,’” said Bi. “I never expected to see so many details such as the brooding behavior and stomach stones in one single specimen. This fossil can tell us important information about non-avian dinosaur behavior.”

The fossil is currently housed at the Lande Museum of Natural History in the city of Tangshan in Hebei Province in China. Though the original fossil can’t leave China, Bi has constructed a 3-D model of it that could end up on display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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