GIANT LEAP

A rare find of an 'egg-in-egg' fossil in Madhya Pradesh has given rise to a hypothesis that titanosaurid sauropods could be closer to birds than reptiles

- SRAVANI SARKAR

The titanosaurid sauropods dominated the Indian subcontinent T about 67 million years ago, thumping their pillar-like limbs and waving around their huge tails. It is well known that dinosaurs, birds and crocodiles are close cousins, belonging to the same sub-class of animals (archosaurs), and that birds actually originated from dinosaurs. Still, it is quite difficult to imagine that the towering titanosaurid sauropods were closer biologically to present day birds than reptiles. However, a rare fossil of an 'abnormal' dinosaur egg discovered at a village in Dhar district in Madhya Pradesh might help boost this perception and open up a new vista of study on dinosaurs.

The find of the first of its kind 'ovum-in-ovo' (one egg inside another) dinosaur egg by a team of Delhi University researchers has thrown open a possibility that as far as the reproductive syster went, the titanosaurid sauropods might have been closer to birds, rather than reptiles like crocodiles, lizards and turtles.

The details of the rare discovery were published on June 7 in Scientific Reports, an online publication of the internationally acclaimed journal Nature. The paper said abnormal eggs had been documented earlier in the case of birds, turtles and dinosaurs. However, till this latest find in India, no egg-in-egg cases had been reported in dinosaurs, or for that matter in any other reptiles, anywhere in the world.