Taiwanese scientists say dinosaurs' eggs may have hatched less efficiently than the eggs of modern birds, requiring the warmth of the sun for baby dinos to emerge successfully. To investigate, the team created fake nests full of eggs, all based on oviraptors - bird-like but flightless dinosaurs that lived between 70 and 66 million years ago. It sounds like they got creative, using polystyrene foam, wood, cotton, bubble wrap, and cloth to contruct a fake parent and the nest, and casting the eggs in resin. This allowed them to simulate heat transfer and predict hatching patterns. They found that these dinosaurs didn’t hatch their eggs in the same way modern birds do, simply by sitting on them. Instead, they likely relied on the sun's warmth to aid incubation, the scientists say. They add that this doesn't mean dinosaurs' eggs were 'worse' at hatching than birds' - it was probably a unique adaptation to the environments they lived in.
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