Animal sexuality

140 years ago, an agate specimen from India was registered in the Mineralogy Collection at London’s Natural History Museum. Now, a team of researchers say the suspiciously spherical agate formed inside a 60-million-year-old dinosaur egg.Spiders Catapult From SexThe agatized egg likely belonged to atitanosaur, which were common in what is now India during the Cretaceous. (Earlier this year, nearly 100 titanosaur nests in India were comprehensively identified and documented.)Robin Hansen, a mineral curator at the museum,…

Screenshot: @beingalibertarian / Instagram / GizmodoEggs used to be something you could rely on, a faithful stalwart, always there to boil or fry in moments when my wallet was light and more expensive kitchen staples like beef felt out of reach. Simpler times. Anyone’s who’s tried to make an omelette recently knows that egg prices are through the roof. In California, unfortunate shoppers have to shell out a stunning $7.37 for a dozen eggs on average, three times what they paid last year, according to the Washington Post.…

A team of paleontologists in India have given 256 fossilized dinosaur eggs a close look, in hopes of better understanding how some of the largest known dinosaurs bred and hatched.The eggs were found across 92 titanosaur nesting sites in India’s Narmada Valley, north and east of Mumbai, with the first clutches discovered in 2012. Now, researchers have published insights about the types of fossilized eggs found in these nests, along with inferences about the dinosaurs that laid them. The team’s research is published today…