Perfectly-preserved dinosaur embryo found inside the fossilized egg in China

A well-preserved dinosaur embryo has been found inside a fossilized egg. The fossilized dinosaur embryo came from Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province in southern China and was acquired by researchers in 2000.

Researchers at Yingliang Group, a company that mines stones, suspected it contained egg fossils, but put it in storage for 10 years, according to a news release.

When construction began on Yingliang Stone Natural History Museum, boxes of unearthed fossils were sorted through.

“Museum staff identified them as dinosaur eggs and saw some bones on the broken cross-section of one of the eggs,” Lida Xing of China University of Geosciences, Beijing, said in a news release. An embryo was found hidden within, which they named “Baby Yingliang.”

The embryo is that of the bird-like oviraptorosaurs, part of the theropod group. Theropod means “beast foot,” but theropod feet usually resembled those of birds. Birds are descended from one lineage of small theropods. 

In studying the embryo, researchers found the dinosaur took on a distinctive tucking posture before hatching, which had been considered unique to birds.

The study is published in the science journal.

Researchers say this behaviour may have evolved through non-avian theropods.

“Most known non-avian dinosaur embryos are incomplete with skeletons disarticulated,” said Waisum Maof the University of Birmingham, U.K.

“We were surprised to see this embryo beautifully preserved inside a dinosaur egg, lying in a bird-like posture. This posture had not been recognized in non-avian dinosaurs before.”

While fossilized dinosaur eggs have been found during the last 100 years, discovering a well-preserved embryo is very rare, the researchers said in the release. 

The embryo’s posture was not previously seen in non-avian dinosaurs, which is “especially notable because it’s reminiscent of a late-stage modern bird embryo.”

The researchers will continue to study the rare specimen in even more depth.

They will attempt to image its internal anatomy. Some of its body parts are still covered in rocks. Their findings can also be used in more studies of fossil embryos.

The MINI terracotta army: Hundreds of small warrior statues found in 2100-year-old pit in China

Inside a 2,100-year-old pit in China, archaeologists have discovered a miniature army of sorts: carefully arranged chariots and mini statues of cavalry, watchtowers, infantry and musicians.

They look like a miniaturized version of the Terracotta Army — a collection of chariots and life-size sculptures of soldiers, horses, entertainers and civil officials — that was constructed for Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China.

Based on the design of the newfound artefacts, archaeologists believe that the pit was created about 2,100 years ago, or about a century after the construction of the Terracotta Army.

The southern part of the pit is filled with formations of cavalry and chariots, along with models of watchtowers that stand 55 inches (140 centimetres) high. At the pit’s centre, about 300 infantrymen stand alert in a square formation, while the northern part of the pit has a model of a theatrical pavilion holding small sculptures of musicians.

“The form and scale of the pit suggest that it accompanies a large burial site,” wrote archaeologists in a paper published recently in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics.

The “vehicles, cavalry and infantry in square formation were reserved for burials of the monarchs or meritorious officials or princes,” the archaeologists wrote.

The soldiers and cavalry in the newly discovered army are much smaller than those in the Terracotta Army. Based on the date, size and location of the pit, archaeologists believe that this newly discovered army may have been built for Liu Hong, a prince of Qi (a part of China), who was the son of Emperor Wu (reign 141–87 B.C.).

Hong was based in Linzi, a Chinese city near the newly discovered pit; he died in 110 B.C. “Textual sources record that Liu Hong was installed as the prince of Qi when he was quite young, and he, unfortunately, died early, without an heir,” archaeologists wrote in the journal article. Shortly before Hong’s death, according to writings by ancient historian Ban Gu, a comet appeared in the sky over China.

Where is the tomb?

If the pit and its ceramic army were meant to protect Liu Hong, or another senior royal family member, in the afterlife, then a tomb should be located nearby, the archaeologists wrote.

“There are possibly architectural remains or a path leading from the pit, but there is no way to explore the main burial chamber,” the researchers wrote, noting that the tomb itself may have been destroyed. 

Older residents in the area have reported descriptions of a prominent earthen mound, some 13 feet (4 meters) high, near the pit, the study authors wrote. “Sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, workers removed the earth and flattened the area in order to widen the Jiaonan-Jinan Railway.”

The reports are corroborated by an aerial photograph taken in 1938 by the Japanese Air Force (at that time, Japan was at war with China). This picture shows a possible burial mound near the railway, the archaeologists noted.

From life size to mini-warriors

The Terracotta Army pits found beside the tomb of the first emperor of China are the only known examples of an army of life-size ceramic soldiers in China.

Shortly after the first emperor’s 210 B.C. death, his dynasty, known as the Qin dynasty, collapsed and a new dynasty, known as the Han, took over China. 

Some of the Han dynasty rulers continued to build pits with armies of ceramic soldiers for their burials, but the soldiers were considerably smaller. For instance, the infantry sculptures in the newly discovered pit are between 9 and 12 inches (22 and 31 cm) tall, nowhere near the heights of the life-size soldiers buried near the tomb of the first emperor.

The pit, along with several other archaeological sites, was discovered in the winter of 2007 during construction work. After its discovery, the pit was excavated by the Cultural Relics Agency of Linzi District of Zibo city.

After excavation was complete, archaeologists from this agency analyzed the artefacts, working with researchers from the Shandong Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.

A report on the pit was first published, in Chinese, in 2016, in the journal Wenwu. This report was recently translated into English and published in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics.

Could cosmic rays unlock the secret tomb of China’s Qin Shi Huang guarded by terracotta warriors?

Cosmic rays may be used to scan the sealed tomb of China’s First Emperor — long rumoured to contain deadly traps and an ancient map with liquid mercury rivers. Buried under a 249-feet-high pyramidal mound, the tomb lies within a necropolis in Xi’an’s Lintong District and is famously guarded by the Terracotta Army.

Found in their thousands to the tomb’s east, as if to protect Qin Shi Huang in death from the eastern states he conquered in life, each statue was once brightly painted. However, exposure to the dry Xi’an air before appropriate conservation techniques had been devised meant that most of the soldiers’ colours faded after recovery.

For this reason, Chinese officials have long been reluctant to allow the tomb itself to be unearthed until they can guarantee the preservation of any artefacts within. However, new proposals would see subatomic particle detectors placed beneath the 2,229-year-old tomb to map out the structure’s layout in three dimensions.

Qin Shi Huang (259–210 BCE) succeeded in conquering and unifying the whole of China in 221 BCE, creating an empire that lasted for some two millennia.

His other achievements including starting construction on the Great Wall of China, establishing a nationwide road network and standardising writing and units. 

His lavish burial site was unearthed in 1974 and has inspired both films and video games, including instalments in both The Mummy and Indiana Jones franchises.

When high-energy cosmic rays from space interact with Earth’s atmosphere, they create a shower of subatomic particles, including some called ‘muons’. 

The scanning technique — ‘muon tomography’ — works as an X-ray, with detectors measuring the rate at which muons are absorbed by the material they pass through.

Just as bones absorb relatively more X-rays than flesh to create contrast in a radiograph, so does stone and metal block the passage of more muons.

The same approach has previously been used, in 2017, to reveal the presence of a previously hidden, 98-feet-long chamber within the Great Pyramid at Giza.

The muon-scanning technique has been proposed by physicist Yuanyuan Liu of the Beijing Normal University and her colleagues, who normally use cosmic rays to investigate the dark matter at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory, which is the world’s deepest cosmic ray facility which is buried some 3.7 miles under the Sichuan province.

‘As an ancient civilisation with a long history, China has a large number of cultural relics that are in need of archaeological research,’ the team told the Times.

‘For the non-intrusive detection of the internal structure of some large artefacts such as imperial tombs, the traditional geophysical methods used in archaeology have certain limitations.

‘The application of muon absorption imaging to the archaeological field can be an important supplement to traditional geophysical methods,’ they concluded. 

To put their proposal to the test, the group used existing archaeological and historical data on the mausoleum to build models of the tomb complex.

They then buried these in the ground on top of two muon detectors to show that they could indeed images the chambers in their models.

‘Preliminary imaging results prove the feasibility of muon absorption imaging for the underground chamber of the mausoleum of the First Qin emperor,’ the team said. 

The feasibility studies were funded by the central Chinese government.

Based on their tests, the team have concluded that — to scan the real-life tomb — at least two muon detectors, each of which is about the size of a washing machine, would need to be placed in different locations within 328 feet (100 metres) of the tomb’s surface.

This is not the first time that archaeologists and other scientists have tried to use non-invasive methods to map out the inside of Qin’s tomb. Unfortunately, most approaches have limitations that make them difficult to apply to the mausoleum’s particular circumstances.

Gravity anomaly detectors are good at detecting changes in density underground — but such are easily affected by environmental disturbances and their range is limited to a small area.

Ground-penetrating radar, meanwhile — a favourite of archaeological geophysicists — suffers from a too limited depth to be of much use here. 

These studies have succeeded in revealing, however, that an underground complex of some kind and state of preservation does extend some 98 feet beneath the pyramidal mound. Archaeologists believe that there is a good chance that the subterranean chambers may still be intact. Certainly, no evidence has been found that graverobbers have ever succeeded in tunnelling their way into the tomb.

Geophysicist Yang Dikun of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen — who was not involved in the present study — told the South China Morning Post that the latest proposal to scan the Emperor’s tomb was feasible.

‘The muon detectors that we build and use for fieldwork nowadays have become so small they can be carried around by a child,’ he commented.

However, Dr Yang warned, the cosmic ray approach is not without potential challenges — the main one being that the detectors have to be physically emplaced underneath the mausoleum complex without damaging it or the artefacts within.

It also required considerable patience, he added. Unlike other imaging techniques, muon tomography is far from instantaneous, and the detectors will need to operate until they have racked up enough particle counts for meaningful analysis.

In fact, simulations by Dr Liu and her team have suggested that — to produce a clear image of the tomb’s structure — the detectors would need to be left in place for at least one year. The full findings of the study were published in the journal Acta Physica Sinica.