Timeline of egg fossil research

This timeline of egg fossils research is a chronologically ordered list of important discoveries, controversies of interpretation, taxonomic revisions, and cultural portrayals of egg fossils. Humans have encountered egg fossils for thousands of years. In Stone Age Mongolia, local peoples fashioned fossil dinosaur eggshell into jewelry. In the Americas, fossil eggs may have inspired Navajo creation myths about the human theft of a primordial water monster's egg. Nevertheless, the scientific study of fossil eggs began much later. As reptiles, dinosaurs were presumed to have laid eggs from the 1820s on, when their first scientifically documented remains were being described in England. In 1859, the first scientifically documented dinosaur "egg" fossils were discovered in southern France by a Catholic priest and amateur naturalist named Father Jean-Jacques Poech, however he thought they were laid by giant birds.
The first scientifically recognized dinosaur egg fossils were discovered serendipitously in 1923 by an American Museum of Natural History crew while looking for evidence of early humans in Mongolia. These eggs were mistakenly attributed to the locally abundant herbivore "Protoceratops", but are now known to be "Oviraptor" eggs. Egg discoveries continued to mount all over the world, leading to the development of multiple competing classification schemes. In 1975 Chinese paleontologist Zhao Zi-Kui started a revolution in fossil egg classification by developing a system of "parataxonomy" based on the traditional Linnaean system to classify eggs based on their physical qualities rather than their hypothesized mothers. Zhao's new method of egg classification was hindered from adoption by Western scientists due to language barriers. However, in the early 1990s Russian paleontologist Konstantin Mikhailov brought attention to Zhao's work in the English language scientific literature.
Prescientific.
Late Paleolithic to early Neolithic
Precolumbian North America
19th-century paleontology.
1859
1869
20th-century paleontology.
1913
1919
1922
1923
1939
1946
1957
1964
1966
1969
1970
They also found that the carbon in the eggshell is mostly the heavier Carbon 13 rather than the lighterCarbon 12. This means the dinosaur were primarily feeding on C3 plants which use 3 carbon atoms in their photosynthesis products rather than C4 plants that use four.
1975
1978
1979
1991
Early to mid-1990s
21st-century paleontology.
2009
2019