Millions of years before humans appeared on the scene – and long before the asteroid that would wipe out the dinosaurs and pave the way for Homo Erectus – a Protoceratops laid a clutch of eggs in what would later become the Gobi desert in Mongolia.
The eggs never hatched. Instead, they stayed frozen and eventually turned into a group of fossils that survived all the way to our current time. In 2017, scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York used a new approach to investigate the fossilized eggs closer, and what they found has sent a shock through the world of dinosaur study.
We know plenty about dinosaurs, and though our knowledge has gaps, there’s one area that has remained a mystery until now. Gregory Erickson, a biology professor from Florida State University, has said “virtually nothing is known” about “some of the greatest riddles about dinosaurs.”
Erickson ended up leading a research team in an attempt to solve some of these mysteries, using these fossilized eggs and the new approach to looking at them. They did indeed discover much, as far as paleontology goes, and now our understanding of dinos has grown.
