Seventy-five million years ago in southern Alberta, a river flooded, burying the eggs of bird-like dinosaurs nesting on the nearby plain. Now, tiny pieces of those fossil egg shells offer new evidence about how dinosaurs lived, bred and evolved into birds.
A new study shows emu-sized, meat-eating troodons were as warm-blooded as birds, with body temperatures of more than 40 C. But unlike modern birds such as chickens that can produce one egg a day, troodons used a very slow egg-forming process similar to the one used by reptiles like crocodiles.
That supports a previous hypothesis that nests found containing up to two dozen eggs were
