A farmer finds an egg that may reveal the cause of the extinction of land turtles after an asteroid collided with Earth

A farmer in China’s Henan Province, a region famous for the thousands of dinosaur eggs people found in 2018, has found an incredibly thick-shelled turtle egg that he donated to a university.

A report published by “Live Science” indicated that 90 million years ago, a giant turtle laid an egg with a very thick outer shell, which was preserved by natural factors, to be found by a Chinese farmer and finally settled in a university in China.
This egg represents a new challenge for scientists, as they hoped it will shed light on the cause of the extinction of terrestrial turtles 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, when an asteroid hit the Earth, and researcher Darla Zelenitsky said that it is possible that these turtles could not adapt to “changes”. climatic and ecological cooler after the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period.

The researchers discovered that the thick eggshell allowed water to penetrate, which prevented the egg, buried deep in the arid land of central China, from drying out, which may indicate that these turtles’ unique wildlife lifestyle, thick-shelled eggs and underground nesting strategy may be the right environment for them. during the Cretaceous period.

A CT scan revealed a preserved turtle embryo inside. Fossils from turtles of the same family have been found in Alberta, but eggs have yet to be discovered here. Read more in @calgaryherald: https://t.co/olq8kutJqQ pic.twitter.com/MbVvOBbt90

— Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology (@RoyalTyrrell) August 18, 2021

Zelenitsky revealed that the dimensions of the egg, slightly smaller than a tennis ball, are larger than the eggs of most live turtles and slightly smaller than the eggs of Galapagos tortoises, and that the thickness of the fossil eggshell (1.8 mm) is four times thicker than the eggshell of the Galapagos tortoise, and six times more than Shell chicken eggs, but larger eggs tend to be thicker, like an ostrich’s shell (2 mm), but “this egg is much smaller than an ostrich egg,” Zelenitsky says.

An equation that uses egg size to predict the length of a turtle’s carapace, the upper part of a tortoise shell, revealed that this thick egg was laid by a turtle with a carapace length (1.6 m), and this measurement does not include the length of the neck or head, in addition, when using micro-computed tomography The researchers found that the fetus has developed approximately 85%.