The 200-Million-Year-Old Secret Hidden Inside a Dinosaur Egg
1. The Fifty-Year Wait In 1976, inside the rust-colored cliffs of South Africa’s Golden Gate Highlands National Park, paleontologist James Kitching uncovered a miracle: a clutch of seven fossilized eggs. They belonged to Massospondylus carinatus, a long-necked herbivore that walked the Earth between 200 and 183 million years ago. For nearly five decades, these eggs remained a tantalizing mystery. They were a paleontological paradox—too fragile to be physically "prepped" out of the rock and too dense for standard hospital X-rays to see through. The secrets of dinosaur development were locked away in stone. To look inside was to risk destroying them. So, the embryos sat in a museum, waiting for technology to catch up with the past. They were tiny, with skulls barely an inch long, representing the humble beginnings of a creature that would eventually balloon into a 15-foot, 2,000-pound giant. 2. The Stadium-Sized Microscope: A Ring of Light The answer finally arrived not in a du...