Giganto-Raptor Egg

The most rare of all dinosaurs eggs are from the top predators on the food chain. Since first described in 1995 by Li, Yin, and Liu this egg type was often conjectured to having been laid by Tyrannosaurus. The dinosaur species was originally described as Tyrannosaurus bataar by Maleev in 1955. In 1965 Rozhdestvensky placed it in Tarbosaurus. Later still, Paul (1988) put it back into Tyrannosaurus, which was accepted by most, but not all. Hence the intermingling of the two names when discussing that dinosaur genus. These eggs were associated with Tarbosaurus / Tyrannosaurus solely because of their large size, shape, rarity, formation found, and the lack of another similar size/type dinosaur known in the same time / location as the eggs. Yet, there was no hard evidence to back up the conjecture because of a lack of preserved late-stage embryonic bones within this egg type. Plus, the great similarity with the much smaller oviraptor eggs made scholars hesitant to push the claim. Indeed, dinosaur egg expert Dr. Darla Zelenitsky had already asserted that this egg type is from an as-yet undiscovered type of giant oviraptor.

Then everything changed in mid 2007 with the announcement of “A Gigantic Bird-like Dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of China” just as Dr. Zelenitsky had predicted. Information on this new find was published in the June 14, 2007 edition (Volume 447) of Nature. The paper describes the fossil remains of a huge dinosaur found in northern China that was as tall as the formidable Tyrannosaur. It would have been about 26 feet long, 16 feet tall, and weighed 3,000 pounds -- and was christened Gigantoraptor erlianensis.

 

Last Modified 08/27/2008

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