{"id":390592,"date":"2026-03-18T01:25:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T01:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/390592\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T01:25:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T01:25:11","slug":"oviraptors-may-have-needed-the-sun-to-hatch-their-eggs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/390592\/","title":{"rendered":"Oviraptors May Have Needed the Sun to Hatch Their Eggs"},"content":{"rendered":"

New experiments indicate bird-like oviraptorid dinosaurs could not fully warm their eggs with body heat alone, instead combining brooding with solar warmth in semi-open nests.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

An artist impression of Huanansaurus ganzhouensis. Image credit: Chuang Zhao.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe show the difference in oviraptor hatching patterns was induced by the relative position of the incubating adult to the eggs,\u201d said Dr. Tzu-Ruei Yang, a paleontologist at Taiwan\u2019s National Museum of Natural Science.<\/p>\n

\u201cMoreover, we obtained an estimate of the incubation efficiency of oviraptors, which is much lower than that of modern birds,\u201d said Chun-Yu Su, a researcher at Washington High School.<\/p>\n

In the study, the researchers simulated the brooding behavior of Heyuannia huangi<\/a>, a species of oviraptorid dinosaur that lived<\/a> in what today is China during the Late Cretaceous epoch, between 70 and 66 million years ago.<\/p>\n

Estimated to be around 1.5 m long and weighing around 20 kg, it built semi-open nests made up of several rings of eggs.<\/p>\n

The incubating oviraptor\u2019s trunk was made from polystyrene foam and wood for the skeletal frame and cotton, bubble paper, and cloth for the soft tissue.<\/p>\n

Eggs were molded from casting resin. In the two clutches used in the experiments, eggs were arranged in double-rings based on real oviraptor clutches.<\/p>\n

\u201cPart of the difficulty lies in reconstructing oviraptor incubation realistically,\u201d Su said.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor example, their eggs are unlike those of any living species, so we invented the resin eggs to approximate real oviraptor eggs as best as we could.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

An artist\u2019s depiction of a Late Cretaceous oviraptorosaur, a hadrosaur, and a tyrannosaur in central China. Image credit: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n

When the team ran experiments to find out if clutch attendance of a brooding adult or different environmental circumstances may have impacted hatching patterns, they found that in colder temperatures, where a brooding adult attended the clutch, the eggs\u2019 temperatures in the outer ring differed by up to 6 degrees Celsius, which could have resulted in asynchronous hatching, a pattern where eggs in the same nest hatch at different times.<\/p>\n

In warmer conditions, the difference in egg temperatures in the outer ring was just 0.6 degrees Celsius, suggesting that oviraptors living in warmer conditions may have exhibited a different pattern of asynchronous hatching because they could use the Sun as an additional, powerful heat source.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s unlikely that large dinosaurs sat atop their clutches. Supposedly they used the heat of the Sun or soil to hatch their eggs, like turtles,\u201d Dr. Yang said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince oviraptor clutches are open to the air, heat from the Sun likely mattered much more than heat from the soil.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers also investigated how oviraptor incubation efficiency compares to that of modern birds.<\/p>\n

Most birds use thermoregulatory contact incubation, where adults sit directly on the eggs to transfer heat.<\/p>\n

The thermoregulatory contact incubation requires three prerequisites \u2014 the adult bird must be in contact with every egg, be the main heat source, and maintain all eggs within a constrained temperature range \u2014 which oviraptors didn\u2019t fulfil.<\/p>\n

\u201cOviraptors may not have been able to conduct the thermoregulatory contact incubation as modern birds do,\u201d Su said.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead, these dinosaurs and the Sun may have been co-incubators \u2014 a less efficient incubation behavior than that displayed by modern birds.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYet, the combination of adult incubation and an ambient heat source \u2014 perhaps a behavioral adaptation associated with the evolution from buried to semi-open nests \u2014 isn\u2019t necessarily worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cModern birds aren\u2019t \u2018better\u2019 at hatching eggs,\u201d Dr. Yang said.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead, birds living today and oviraptors have a very different way of incubation or, more specifically, brooding.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing is better or worse. It just depends on the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The findings<\/a> were published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.<\/p>\n

_____<\/p>\n

Chun-Yu Su et al. 2026. Heat transfer in a realistic clutch reveals a lower efficiency in incubation of oviraptorid dinosaurs than of modern birds. Front. Ecol. Evol 14; doi: 10.3389\/fevo.2026.1351288<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New experiments indicate bird-like oviraptorid dinosaurs could not fully warm their eggs with body heat alone, instead combining…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":390593,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[77],"tags":[27375,25969,381,8098,23429,67453,18,18330,178398,178399,178400,19,12982,17,43705,178401,178402,178403,178404,133,17135],"class_list":["post-390592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-bird","tag-brooding","tag-china","tag-cretaceous","tag-dinosaur","tag-egg","tag-eire","tag-heat","tag-heat-transfer","tag-heyuannia","tag-heyuannia-huangi","tag-ie","tag-incubation","tag-ireland","tag-nest","tag-oviraptor","tag-oviraptoridae","tag-oviraptorosaur","tag-oviraptorosauria","tag-science","tag-sun"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116247575010083891","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390592\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/390593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}