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67M-Year-Old Dinosaur Eggs Upend a Long-Held Assumption

Feathers, wishbones, colored eggs. If they're things you associate as only found in birds, you're wrong, says paleontologist Mark Norell. 

It turns out dinosaurs evolved all three, though we've only just recently learned about that last item. The discovery of fossil egg-shells in China has upended the conventional wisdom that all dino eggs were white, a belief born out of the fact that, as National Geographic reports, lizard, turtle, and crocodile eggs are white.

 But as a study newly published in Peer J explains, researchers now believe that a species of oviraptor named Heyuannia huangi laid blue-green eggs. While fossil eggs often end up looking brown or black, the 67 million-year-old ones found in China seemed blueish, which led scientists to try—and, as it turns out, succeed—to identify bits of colored pigments.

Read the full story on Newser.com

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