The dinosaur that laid blue-green eggs

Abstract

Mark Hauber at Hunter College in New York and his colleagues discovered that the color of many birds' eggs comes from the way that two pigments in the shell--biliverdin and protoporphyrin--blend with each other and with the calcium carbonate that makes most of the shell. Martin Sander of Bonn University in Germany has an idea. In a separate study, he and his team looked at eggs from prehistoric sites in China where Oviraptor dinosaurs laid their eggs millions of years ago. Dinosaur eggs found elsewhere are typically deep brown or black as minerals have seeped in over time and stained them, obscuring pigment molecules in the shell. Team member Jasmina Wiemann found the Oviraptor eggs contained biliverdin and protoporphyrin in a ratio suggesting they were blue-green.