Mamma Mia! Fossil Is First Hint Of Live Birth In Ancient Reptile

What do I love most about this artist rendering of a pregnant Dinocephalosaurus? Is it capturing the marine reptile's epic neck-to-body proportion? Is it the tasteful allusion to the offspring in her belly? No, it's the freshly chomped fish in her mouth, and the bloody cloud around it. Nom nom nom. Don't mess with Mom when she's hungry. Credit: Dinghua Yang & Jun Liu. Here's some egg-citing news: for the first time in the fossil record, researchers have discovered a specific type of marine reptile that was carrying an advanced embryo at time of death. Why is that interesting? Because the specimen is an archosauromorph, an early member of the same gang of vertebrates that includes dinosaurs as well as pterosaurs, birds and crocodiles, all of which we thought, based on previous evidence, were exclusively egg-layers. Today that changes. Some 245 million years ago, Dinocephalosaurus was a marine reptile swimming ...