... a dinosaur?

By: Aimee Bachelder

This may be a simple question, but any parent trying to provide an answer this Easter might struggle to come up with a satisfactory response," Mark Purnell, a researcher at the University of Leicester, said in a statement. "According to many, the eggs are delivered by the Easter Bunny, but that doesn't really address the question: Where does the

Where do Easter eggs come from?

The research started as an analysis of a newly discovered 70-million-year-old egg, one that would've been laid by a mother dinosaur during the Late Cretaceous when Tyrannosaurus rex walked the earth.

To figure out if the egg belonged to an ancient bird or its dinosaur relatives, the team compared the shapes of eggs from birds and dinosaurs.

70 million year old egg?

Dinosaur Eggs vs. Birds Eggs vs. Easter Eggs?

The pale gray eggs are from

birds, and the darker grayeggs are from dinosaurs. Most

Easter eggs, as shown on the

right, are similar in shape to

bird's eggs, but some are

closer to the eggs of

dinosaurs. The Easter egg on

the left is particularly close to

the newly described Sankofa

dinosaur egg.

They found the new Sankofa egg fell somewhere between dinosaur eggs and bird eggs. It's oval-shaped than teardrop-shaped. There are no other eggs like it, the researchers said.

Conclusions

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46986168/ns/technology_and_science-science/

Sources