Thought u Guys Would be Intrested

[The Masked Shadow]

Hey MFK! Thought you guys would be intrested in this article. Also, I put this under Reptile, Amphibians, and Other Pets cuz I didn't know where else to put it

Giant ancient egg found in Antarctica could be first from a mosasaur

A strange fossil discovered in Antarctica almost a decade ago has finally been identified. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have determined that the object is a giant, soft-shell egg, most likely laid by an ancient marine reptile.

newatlas.com

 

[fishhead0103666]

Fantastic article find, I throughly enjoyed reading it comrade.

 

[The Masked Shadow]

Thanks, fishhead! Did a project on this article, and thought some MFKers may wanna see it.

 

[suckerfish]

I’ve always wondered if they laid eggs or live birth? Maybe a comb

 

[Deadeye]

Great article!
Now all we have to do is recreate the egg so we can have a living one...
If only it were possible.

 

[Zack cloutier]

Can’t they make chicken eggs produce a Dino like creature? I could be mixing facts with fiction but didn’t some scientist do this or are working on it?

If that’s the case couldn’t they do it with a crocodile too and recreate something along the line of that dinosaur?

 

[Deadeye]

From what I know, we currently don’t have enough of Dino DNA to synthesize something like that (I think we can with dodos and mammoths), but it isn’t yet possible with dinosaurs. Once we can find fossils or remains with enough DNA we could Jurassic park it though.
I think the most likely would be with the (distant) relationship between t rexs and chickens. Crocodilians existed during the dinosaur era, so they would be the closest relatives to modern crocs, not to dinosaurs.

Closest thing to a modern dinosaur would probably be a frilled neck lizard or an earless monitor.

 

[jjohnwm]

Interesting article. They seem to be implying that the eggs were laid in the water...which flies in the face of the way in which modern reptiles reproduce. Eggs are laid in moist locations but never actually in water. The soft-shelled eggs of modern reptiles will dehydrate and die if too dry, but will also "drown" if submerged.

On the other hand, it seems pretty far-fetched that a fully-aquatic animal the size of a mosasaur would be able to haul its bulk out of the water to lay eggs on beaches in the manner of sea turtles. Like large whales, it would likely be unable to breath or even have a skeleton capable of supporting its shape without the buoyancy provided by water. This was one of the original thoughts behind the live-birth school of thought.

Gee...I wonder if this idea is the brain-child of the kind of "experts" who find a chip of bone the size of a dime...and extrapolate from it a 60-foot-long dinosaur that walked on its hind limbs, had a frilled backbone, ate only prehistoric kumquats and had a preference for soft jazz music. Then, when the fossilized chip is identified as a bone from the barbecued chicken the team ate the day before...the expert is never heard from again...

 

[Magnus_Bane]

Interesting article. They seem to be implying that the eggs were laid in the water...which flies in the face of the way in which modern reptiles reproduce. Eggs are laid in moist locations but never actually in water. The soft-shelled eggs of modern reptiles will dehydrate and die if too dry, but will also "drown" if submerged.

On the other hand, it seems pretty far-fetched that a fully-aquatic animal the size of a mosasaur would be able to haul its bulk out of the water to lay eggs on beaches in the manner of sea turtles. Like large whales, it would likely be unable to breath or even have a skeleton capable of supporting its shape without the buoyancy provided by water. This was one of the original thoughts behind the live-birth school of thought.

Gee...I wonder if this idea is the brain-child of the kind of "experts" who find a chip of bone the size of a dime...and extrapolate from it a 60-foot-long dinosaur that walked on its hind limbs, had a frilled backbone, ate only prehistoric kumquats and had a preference for soft jazz music. Then, when the fossilized chip is identified as a bone from the barbecued chicken the team ate the day before...the expert is never heard from again...

Now if we were to talk about prehistoric marine reptiles that could lay eggs on land I would imagine something along the lines of Archelon, the largest ever recorded sea turtle to swim in the oceans. As for the size of their eggs, we can only speculate based off of modern day sea turtles. But I can imagine that these guys probably had the same nesting/mating habits that the modern day ones do.

 

[jjohnwm]

That's a big turtle, at over 4 meters in length; seems reasonable that they would manage to breed like today's biggest ones.

Mosasaurs were apparently capable of reaching something like 18 meters or more; that's a whole 'nother level of big.