The eggs are potato-shaped;
fossilisation appears to have
retained surface texture
Posted on 04/15/2005 12:17:10 AM PDT by bd476
A dinosaur that died just before it was about to lay two eggs has been found by an international team of scientists. The creature, which lived 65-98 million years ago, was discovered in China's Jiangxi Province.
The fossilised remains comprise little more than a pelvis with the shelled eggs still viewable in the body cavity. Tamaki Sato and colleagues tell Science magazine the dinosaur's reproductive system shares similarities with both primitive reptiles and modern birds.
The animal was probably a theropod; the name describes a broad group of bipedal, largely carnivorous dinosaurs which many scientists believe gave rise to birds.
It would have been about three to four metres long.
The team says the creature's reproductive system resembled that of a crocodile in the sense that it had two ovaries and two oviducts down which eggs would be pushed, shelled and eventually laid. In contrast, modern birds have just the one ovary-oviduct combo.
However, it is clear, the team says, that this dinosaur, like birds but unlike crocodiles, could not lay all its eggs at once.
Given that nests of similar dinosaurs have been discovered with more than a dozen eggs in them, it suggests this animal would have laid two eggs and then repeated the process until her nest was full.
"It is unlikely that this specimen could have had multiple pairs of shelled eggs inside the body at one time," Tamaki Sato, from the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, and her team write in Science.
"Unless sequential egg formation and shelling was very rapid and/or there was an extremely prolonged period of egg laying, the preservation of only two tightly juxtaposed eggs in the specimen strongly indicates that each of the paired oviducts simultaneously produced a single egg."
Da da da da dad da da da da
I don't know why, but when I read this, I started humming the Jurrasic Park theme song.
Are we so far off from that?
Dino Omlette anyone?
The paradigm for egg fossilization would have to be sudden burial in the right kind of high silicon slurry. Gradual burial and thousands of years of mineral exchange, blah blah blah seems so very unlikely.
I can't relate to which tune you are humming perhaps because I was paying too much attention to those large lizards with big teeth.
Yum! Do you separate out the egg whites and whip them before blending them back in with the yolks and added ingredients?
Thanks! Do you use cake flour, buckwheat, whole wheat or what for your waffles?
Any or a combo of them. Be careful with the WW don't use only that or they will be very dense. Use a 50/50 mix with WW. I have even used the pre mixed batter powders and it comes out fine.
The trick is fluff those whites and GENTLY fold into the the rest of the mixed batter.
Fluff the egg whites until they form peaks or until just before then?
Stiff peaks
Thanks. It's a little late at night/early in the morning to do a lot of cooking, but I'm hungry enough to think about it, LOL!
I used to have the best recipe for a chocolate chip pound cake. I found it in an old library book and it was a famous recipe from a restaurant I had never heard of. That pound cake was the best in the world, if I do say so myself.
Don't forget the BACON!!!
Pound cake-
Ingredients:
3 cups cake flour
6 large eggs
1 pound butter
1 pound sugar
3 cups Ch. Chips
2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup buttermilk
Sift the flour into a large mixing bowl. Stir in
the sugar. I use a large spoon for this. Next I add
the butter. My grandmother would melt the butter
in a pan over slow heat to make it blend easier.
You can do this or just let the butter soften at
room temperature. Add the eggs, whole. At this
point I break out my mixer and begin mixing on
slow. I slowly add my buttermilk, and then the
vanilla extract. After it is thoroughly stirred,
I turn the mixer up to medium for a few minutes,
and then finally on high. If the mixture is a little
thick I add just a touch more buttermilk. If you don't
mix things thoroughly you will have lumps that will
form air bubbles in your mixture and leave holes
in your finished cake. Add the chips. It was always a matter of pride
not to have these air pocket holes in our cakes so we
always made sure we got all of the lumps. In the
pre-electric-mixer day that involved a lot of whipping
the cake by hand. We usually didn't have a hand cranked
mixer
that worked well, so this involved a large mixing spoon
to whip it. Some old timers even counted the number
of times they whipped the mixture - sort of made it
fun and you didn't notice your arm tiring.
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
Take your standard tube cake pan and oil it with
butter. Then lightly flour the oiled pan. Shake
the excess flour from the pan.
Pour the mix in, bake the cake for about 1 hour
and twenty minutes. Keep looking at how your cake
is doing through the oven door but avoid opening
the door too much while it is cooking as I have
seen this, or jarring a cake, cause it to collapse.
When you think it is done, do the toothpick test.
Stick a wooden toothpick into one of the thickest
parts of the cake. If it's dry when you pull it our,
the cake is done.
Allow the cake to cool 15 or 20 minutes in the pan.
Then gently remove it, and stick it on your favorite
decorative cake plate.
I haven't seen the third one, I'm talking about the first Jurrasic Park movie theme song.
one summer in high school, summer of '96, I worked at Universal Studios Theme Park in LA.
They had just opened up the Jurrasic Park ride and I worked right near it....so for eight hours a day, all I heard was the "da da da da da da da da da da" theme song on a three minute loop.
I nearly lost my mind.
A friend of mine had it worse though, near his station, they constantly looped the "Murder She Wrote" theme song!
Ay karomba!
Quick...Someone find a big chicken to hatch it.
Stop Stop STOP!!!!!!!!!
Broke my ribs and all I have is 2 stupid dogs and a spoon
and I am about ready.... well never mind:)
OMG!!!!!!!!!! LOL!!!!!!!!!
Did I mention it hurts to laugh........:)
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