Dinosaur eggs: gas conductance through the shell, water loss during incubation and clutch size

Abstract

The conductance of water vapor and respiratory gases by diffusion through the eggshells of Upper Cretaceous dinosaurs has been estimated from measurements of shell and pore geometry in fossil specimens. When compared to recent reptile and bird eggs for which nest environments are known, the highly porous eggshells of three dinosaur species indicate that the dinosaur nests were high in humidity and probably low in oxygen and high in carbon dioxide. Such conditions most likely occurred underground or within an incubation mound.By isolating the eggs from the atmosphere, however, some large sauropods may have been forced to limit their clutch size to numbers small enough to prevent depletion of oxygen and elevation of carbon dioxide to intolerable levels in the nest. Fossil evidence supports this and suggests that one sauropod actually divided her large eggs into several clutches. Each small clutch probably had a metabolic rate similar to those of clutches produced by recent reptiles and mound nesting birds.