Did dinosaurs lay colorful eggs?
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If you want to protect your favorite public media programming and podcasts like this one, visit AmericanPublicMedia.org slash action to learn how you can help. One more time, that's AmericanPublicMedia.org slash action. Thanks so much for standing up for public media. From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of arm. ♪

Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Earl of Earl's Egg-cellent Egg Emporium. Here at my Egg Emporium, we sell the finest egg specimens of all shapes and sizes.

Huge, creamy, white ostrich eggs. Hello, my beauties. Little speckly quail eggs the size of a gumball. And, of course, leathery alligator eggs. These gator babies are just about to hatch. It's truly the most... Oh, it's starting. See their tiny alligator heads poking out?

Taking their first look at the world? They look like little dinosaurs. I wish I could get some real dinosaur eggs here at my egg-cellent egg emporium. I wonder what dinosaur eggs look like anyway. Were they soft and leathery like alligator eggs? Spotted? Colorful?

My friends and fellow egg fans, Robin and Fen, had a question about this too. ♪

We think that the dinosaurs' eggs that we have, that we know of, were all hard-shelled, like bird eggs. My name is Callie Moore. I manage the fossil collection at the University of Montana in Missoula. I also am a coast and content consultant for PBS Eons, and I'm an executive producer on the documentary, Why Dinosaurs? ♪

Probably since about 2017, paleontologists have been looking into whether or not we can see any kind of pigments on dinosaur eggshells. And we found, excitingly, that pigments can actually be preserved in the eggshells, specifically the pigments for red, brown, and blue-green colors. And these are the same that are responsible for all the different colors in modern bird eggs.

Some of them were all over. Some of them were speckled. So, for example, there's a species of Oviraptor. These are these kind of weird toothless beak-looking theropods. And it was found to have blue-green eggs. And then Deinonychus, one of the real famous kind of raptors with the big sickle toe claw, it had speckled eggs.

So we're finding what's kind of neat is that this probably has to do with different nesting strategies. So whether you bury your eggs or partially have them open on the ground, or if you're in a tree, these colorful or patterned eggs might have been important for camouflage. We only have about 30 different kinds of dinosaur eggs.

So unless we find a dinosaur actually sitting on a nest, which we have found, it's hard to know exactly which dinosaur laid the eggs. So a lot of times we give eggs their own name, just like Tyrannosaurus rex.

an egg will have its own name, its own genus species name. And then all eggs like it are named that same name. And then hopefully someday we find an egg either inside a dinosaur still that matches that egg, or we find an embryonic dinosaur inside that egg that we can match to an adult. Or we find the actual dinosaur sitting on its nest. And then that would tell us which eggs go with which dinosaurs. ♪

Um, uh... Incredible! Dinosaur eggs had hard shells, like chicken eggs! And they came in all different shapes, sizes, and colors. We know from old fossils that some were green, brown, red, or even deep blue.

Scientists think that these colors probably helped camouflage the eggs and help to hide them from other animals who wanted to eat them. Looks like the baby gators decided it's time to climb out of the nest. No, no, no, no, no, no. Not the rare hummingbird egg collection. It's not for playing with. And it's not a snack. Do you hear me? Come back now, babies. Come back.

If you like this episode, take a second to subscribe to Moment of Um wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you can't get enough dino facts, check out the Forever Ago History podcast where we have a whole episode all about the Bone Wars. It's about a raging rivalry over fossils and dinosaur bones.

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See you next time and the next day and every weekday. Until then... Here, gator, gator, gator, gator. Back to the nest.