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April 10th, 2013 
THE oldest collection of dinosaur embryos ever found has offered an unprecedented glimpse into the early growth of some prehistoric giants.
Dinosaur embryos are surprisingly rare so there has been little chance to study early dinosaur development, say a group of scientists led by Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto in an article in the journal Nature.
But they reveal findings from a Lower Jurassic sauropodomorph “bone bed” in China that contains eggshells and more than 200 bones at various stages of development from about 190 million to 197 million years ago.
Sauropodomorphs grew to very large sizes, had long necks and tails and became the largest animals to walk the Earth.
In the paper, they say the discovery “provides an unprecedented window into the embryonic growth in a dinosaur because these fossils represent numerous individuals at various stages of embryonic development”.
The bones showed that the dinosaurs grew rapidly and flexed their muscles while still in the egg helping to build a skeleton suitable for life outside the egg.
“This capacity for rapid growth was evidently maintained after hatching, explaining the ability of sauropodomorphs to consistently achieve larger adult size than their dinosaurian contemporaries and in some cases reach gigantic proportions,” the paper says.
Previous discoveries have been almost entirely restricted to the Upper Cretaceous period and many specimens have been limited to embryos encased in eggshells.
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