 | Titled "Sauropods Hatching," this artwork by Luis Rey is part of a new multi-media exhibition at the Peabody Museum that looks at scientists' theories that dinosaurs and birds are closely related. |
Dinosaur and bird eggs and nests -- including a 50-million-year-old bird egg geode -- are among the objects on view in a new exhibit at the Peabody Museum of Natural History that explores the link between dinosaurs and birds.
"Hatching the Past: Dinosaur Eggs, Nests & Young," is a multi-media, hands-on exhibition that helps give credence to scientists' theories that dinosaurs and birds are closely related. The exhibit is on view through June 1.
Highlights of the exhibition include an eight-foot, life-size model of a dinosaur nest and an array of dinosaur eggs, fossil embryos and nests from China, Argentina and elsewhere, including those of sauropods, hadrosaurs and oviraptors. Among the eggs on view from the Peabody Museum's permanent collection of some 40,000 eggs are those from birds which are today considered "living dinosaurs": the ostrich, emu and hummingbird. The exhibition also features an eggshell fragment from an extinct elephant bird known formally as Aepyornis, which laid the largest egg ever known. A cast of the large egg produced by this creature is also on display.
A partial clutch of at least 11 eggs laid by Troodon, a small, feathered maniraptor, has been prepared for the exhibit to show the underside of the eggs. Based on fossil evidence from closely related species, it is believed that the earliest maniraptors engaged in brooding and egg-moving behaviors such as that of birds. Egg-laying mammals represented in the exhibition are the duck-billed platypus and echidna, an animal that lives in Australia and New Zealand.
The 50-million-year-old geode on view, lined with calcite crystals, is a fossilized bird egg that contains embryonic bird bones at one end. Its size, shape and shell structure, as well as the environment in which it was fossilized, suggest that this rare egg is from a bird that once inhabited near-shore aquatic habitats, believed by scientists to be Presbyornis, an extinct wading bird that may be related to ducks and swans.
Visitors to "Hatching the Past" will have the opportunity to stop at exploration stations where they compare different dinosaur eggshells under a magnifier and touch real dinosaur bones. Also featured will be fossil "digs"; a DVD presentation about the discovery of "Baby Louie," a dinosaur embryo from a giant species of oviraptor; and talks by paleontologists currently doing research on the link between dinosaurs and birds.
Jacques Gauthier, professor of geology and geophysics and of ecology and evolutionary biology, is the curator of the new exhibit at the Peabody Museum, where he is also curator of vertebrate paleontology. He is among the Yale researchers who have advanced the theory about the dinosaur/bird link. (See related story.)
"Hatching the Past" was developed by Stone Company, Colorado, in association with the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Yale's Peabody Museum augmented the exhibit with samples from its rare egg collections. Fleet Bank has provided support for the Peabody showing.
The Peabody Museum of Natural History, 170 Whitney Ave., is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday, and noon-5 p.m. on Sunday. Admission is $7 for adults; $6 for seniors 65 and over; and $5 for children ages 3-18 and for older students with I.D. Admission is free to all on Thursdays, 2-5 p.m. Members of the museum, Yale affiliates with an I.D. and children under 3 are admitted free.
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