ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Dinosaur incubation periods directly determined from growth-line counts in embryonic teeth show reptilian-grade development.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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22 citing papers in PubMed, 65 citations in OpenAlex.
- Metabolic features of enantiornithines (Avialae: Ornithothoraces): evidence supporting a semi-precocial/precocial developmental trajectory.Royal Society open science · 2026Article
- Deciphering causes and behaviors: A recurrent pattern of tail injuries in hadrosaurid dinosaurs.iScience · 2025Article
- Growing with dinosaurs: a review of dinosaur reproduction and ontogeny.Biology letters · 2025Review
- Cellular, Molecular, and Genetic Mechanisms of Avian Beak Development and Evolution.Annual review of genetics · 2024Review
- Chthonic severance: dinosaur eggs of the Mesozoic, the significance of partially buried eggs and contact incubation precursors.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Comparative microstructural study on the teeth of Mesozoic birds and non-avian dinosaurs.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Shifts in food webs and niche stability shaped survivorship and extinction at the end-Cretaceous.Science advances · 2022Article
- The Mesozoic terminated in boreal spring.Nature · 2022Article
- The first dinosaur egg was soft.Nature · 2020Article
- Ultramicrostructural reductions in teeth: implications for dietary transition from non-avian dinosaurs to birds.BMC evolutionary biology · 2020Article
- Conserved in-ovo cranial ossification sequences of extant saurians allow estimation of embryonic dinosaur developmental stages.Scientific reports · 2020Article
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- High-latitude neonate and perinate ornithopods from the mid-Cretaceous of southeastern Australia.Scientific reports · 2019Article
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- Appendicular skeleton ofPeerJ · 2019Article
- Why did the dinosaurs become extinct? Could cholecalciferol (vitamin DJournal of nutritional science · 2019Article
- An Intermediate Incubation Period and Primitive Brooding in a Theropod Dinosaur.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- The origin of the bird's beak: new insights from dinosaur incubation periods.Biology letters · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Birds stand out from other egg-laying amniotes by producing relatively small numbers of large eggs with very short incubation periods (average 11-85 d). This aspect promotes high survivorship by limiting exposure to predation and environmental perturbation, allows for larger more fit young, and facilitates rapid attainment of adult size. Birds are living dinosaurs; their rapid development has been considered to reflect the primitive dinosaurian condition. Here, nonavian dinosaurian incubation periods in both small and large ornithischian taxa are empirically determined through growth-line counts in embryonic teeth. Our results show unexpectedly slow incubation (2.8 and 5.8 mo) like those of outgroup reptiles. Developmental and physiological constraints would have rendered tooth formation and incubation inherently slow in other dinosaur lineages and basal birds. The capacity to determine incubation periods in extinct egg-laying amniotes has implications for dinosaurian embryology, life history strategies, and survivorship across the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event.
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