Name: Inside a Fossilized Pterosaur Egg
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To uncover the secrets of a pterosaur egg, Sir David Attenborough visits researchers using the latest technology to analyze these extinct creatures’ fossils.

Bones and shells can tell us a lot about how these creatures lived.

Inside a Fossilized Pterosaur Egg

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To uncover the secrets of a pterosaur egg, Sir David Attenborough visits researchers using the latest technology to analyze these extinct creatures’ fossils.

Bones and shells can tell us a lot about how these creatures lived.

Evolution

Inside a Fossilized Pterosaur EggPublished: May 27, 2022DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: This is the fossilized egg of a pterosaur that Robert and his team found in the crumbly layer, the only one ever discovered in North America. If you look at it with a naked eye, all you see is a jumble of lines. But if you examine it with the latest technology, you can find out a wealth of information, from the chemistry of the bones to the composition of the shell. And that, in turn, can tell us a lot about how these incredible creatures lived.To investigate the pterosaur egg, Robert has been given access to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron. Situated in Oxfordshire, in the U.K., it’s a powerful research tool that acts like a giant microscope. By accelerating electrons in this huge ring, the synchrotron creates beams of light, billions of times brighter than the sun.Robert and paleobiologist Dr. Victoria Egerton now want to turn that beam onto the egg fossil, to discover more about its chemical makeup.ROBERT DEPALMA: We’re pretty much lined up on the skeleton, but we might have to move the stage a little bit to get to the right part.DR. VICTORIA EGERTON: Sure.DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Each synchrotron scan can take several hours.Meanwhile, Robert can reveal the creature inside.Who made this wonderful thing?ROBERT DEPALMA: I got replicas of the bones from inside that egg, and I restored the remainder and put together what the skeleton would’ve looked like when it hatched. That’s how big the creature would’ve been outside the egg, if it had hatched.DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: So, this is the baby. How big was it going to grow?ROBERT DEPALMA: These very long neck vertebrae, here, are what really gave part of the story away to us, because those long bones match very, very closely with the azhdarchoid pterosaurs, that is, the giant pterosaurs.DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Oh, they were the whoppers, weren’t they? I mean, what? Twenty-five-feet-wingspan?ROBERT DEPALMA: Some of them. This probably had a wingspan, maybe 15 feet, five meters.DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Well, it looks as though it could take off, really.ROBERT DEPALMA: It’s easy to picture something like that, just hatching out of the egg and fluttering out, almost like a little bat.DAVID MARTILL (Paleobiologist, University of Portsmouth): A lot of birds are utterly dependent on the parents bringing them food for a long time. But there are precocious birds, and there are some that simply stand up after a few minutes and start foraging for food themselves. Well, pterosaurs might have taken that a stage further, and they simply flew away.DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: They’ve scanned the egg here and in America. Victoria has the results.So, what have you learned from the synchrotron image?VICTORIA EGERTON: What we have here is a chemical map of calcium, directly within the bones of this animal. That tells us that these bones were already hardened, so it might be ready to fly not long after it hatches.DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Okay. Can you see any sign of the shell? And what sort of shell was it?VICTORIA EGERTON: We can. What I can show you,…DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Ah.VICTORIA EGERTON: …is we can see the rim of the egg in sulfur.DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Does that tell you whether it was a hard shell or a soft shell?VICTORIA EGERTON: We have been looking at this. We can see folding occurring and this unusual undulation. If it were a hard egg, we would expect splintered bits and broken bits, just like a chicken egg. This helped to tell us that it was soft.DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: So, it was perhaps like a turtle?VICTORIA EGERTON: Absolutely.

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Inside a Fossilized Pterosaur Egg

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Support Provided By

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