Study on Dinosaur Eggs in China: Yesterday and Today
中国恐龙蛋研究的历史与现状

This paper gives a brief introduction to the research history of dinosaur eggs in China, which can be roughly divided into three stages: morphological classification stage, semi-natural classification stage and natural classification stage. Two elongatoolithid dinosaur eggs from the Upper Cretaceous of Ganzhou, southern Jiangxi and the embryonic skeletons they bear are described herein. They represent the first oviraptorosaurian eggs with embryonic skeletons in China and provide the first example that an oospecies can be correlated to certain dinosaur taxon (or taxa). The two eggs are same as the pair of eggs inside a female oviraptorosaurian pelvis from the same horizon of the same area in both macro- and micro-structures of the egg shells, and can be referred to the oospecies, Macroolithus yaotunensis Zhao, 1975. The morphology of the preserved part of the embryonic skeletons indicates that they may have been laid by an oviraptorid, Heyuannia huangi from Guangdong Province or a closely related oviraptorosaurian, which may have been lived in the Ganzhou area too in Late Cretaceous. The embryonic skele-tons of the two eggs are not in the same developing stage. In one of the eggs, the postzygapophysis of the pre-served vertebrae are well ossified, indicating that it was just hatched.