Dinosaur egg identified in Alabama may hold clues about dino evolution

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The egg was destined to hatch into a dinosaur. Then came the water. 

Swept away by a storm or knocked into a river, the egg drifted to sea at a time when the Gulf Coast stretched somewhere north of Montgomery, Alabama. About 82 million years later in 1970, 17-year-old fossil enthusiast Prescott Atkinson found the fossilized egg intact in the chalk beds of Selma, Alabama, the only dinosaur egg ever found east of the Mississippi River and the only one in the world found in marine sediment. 

“If I hadn't found it when I did, probably within a couple of weeks, it would have been destroyed by the elements and falling apart,” said Atkinson, now a 69-year-old immunologist in Birmingham, Alabama. 

But the egg’s lengthy journey did not end with its discovery. 

Iron pyrite crystals within the egg obfuscated x-rays and CT scans. For decades it sat in museums and university drawers, its identity shrouded in mystery. 

Now, the identity of the dinosaur within the egg is believed to be known, experts say. And the egg itself may hold new clues as to how dinosaurs developed and evolved. 

“I've been just so thrilled about the whole thing,” Atkinson said. “It has implications for evolution on the whole group.”

What’s in the egg?

Ricardo Araújo, a paleontologist at the University of Lisbon, said he believes the dinosaur is a species of ornithomimid.

Meaning “bird mimic,” ornithomimids were bipedal herbivores with a long slender neck and small head believed to move like ostriches. The dinosaur is a familiar figure in pop culture. In the movie Jurassic Park a flock of them sprint away from a Tyrannosaurus rex. 

“Ornithomimids are relatively rare worldwide, but particularly in the U.S. as well,” Araújo said. “And you don't have any other ornithomimid embryos found ever. It’s really putting Alabama paleontology in the center of the world because it is such a unique find.”

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Clues to the dinosaur’s identity finally were revealed in late 2017 after the egg underwent scans at the European Radiation Synchrotron Facility in Grenoble, France. Using X-ray beams 100 billion times brighter than hospital radiology equipment, fingernail-sized scans of the egg were captured, and 144,000 images were used to stitch together an image of the embryonic skeleton. 

“Usually synchrotrons are for really nano stuff, micro stuff, but they adapted the optics such that it managed to scan through a large dinosaur egg,” Araújo said. 

The scan also revealed something unexpected about the egg’s structure. Instead of three egg shell layers which is common, this ornithomimid shell only had one despite being an advanced form of the dinosaur. 

“It really unveils that we still know very little about the evolution of the eggshell throughout theropod evolution,” Araújo said. “We have a model that was the reigning paradigm since the 1980s of the continuous addition of the number of layers throughout theropod evolution. And now this specimen is kind of like disproving that.” 

A long journey for the Alabama dino egg

There is more work to be done to fully understand the creature found unhatched in the dust-colored chalk beds of Selma. 

Araújo is continuing to study the egg's shell structure and is working on a paper to share his findings with the scientific community. And he is working to create 3D printed, larger versions of the small, brittle bones so the embryotic skeleton can be assembled without breaking the egg. 

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“To study them in such dimensions, it would be crazy because they are millimeters long,” Araújo said. “So we printed them about 10 times larger so we can really see all the anatomical details. Then we’ll construct the animal in 3D.” 

It’s taken decades for technology to catch up and finally crack the mysteries of the egg.

After Atkinson's discovery in 1970, he gave it to Auburn University professor James Dobie. X-rays and a CT scan at a children's hospital both failed to pierce the crystalline structure. Atkinson said the egg sat for “a couple decades" in a drawer at Auburn.

Dobie "had no idea there were actually bones in it or it would have been the first embryonated egg ever described,” Atkinson said. 

In 1996, a paleontology student named James Lamb borrowed the egg for work on a graduate thesis. Four years later, Lamb decided to cut out a section of the shell and examine it under a microscope. It was only then, 30 years after its discovery, that the presence of a dinosaur was confirmed. 

“We became tremendously excited when James found it had an embryo,” Atkinson told the Montgomery Advertiser, a part of the Paste BN Network, in 2017. “For all we knew, we thought it was an empty shell basically.”

Attempts to reach Lamb were unsuccessful. But in 2017, he recounted how the bones were as thin as paper and impossible to remove from the pyrite. 

“I could have removed all the bones, but I didn’t think that was the right thing to do," said Lamb, then director of the Black Belt Museum. 

In 2008, Lamb heard about the synchrotron being used to examine bugs smaller than a pencil tip trapped within clouded amber. In 2014, he took the egg to Grenoble.

“It sat in a drawer in Auburn for 30 or so years, and I sat for a decade waiting for technology to catch up,” Lamb said in 2017. “It seems like a long time, but it’s worth the wait. Compared to how long this egg’s been around, it’s a drop in the bucket.”

Araújo hopes to publish his paper on what the egg’s shell structure means for dinosaur evolution and development by the end of the year. 

“It's taking a little bit of time, but I think it will be a very significant finding in the end,” Araújo said. 

For Atkinson, he finally has answers more than 50 years after a chance teenage discovery. As for the egg, it's back at Auburn University where it will be stored in a custom-built display case instead of a drawer. 

“I know that the specimen will eventually find its way into the scientific literature,” Atkinson said. “It's satisfying to have had the good fortune to come across it.”

Follow Andrew Yawn on Twitter: @yawn_meister.