One day in October 1995 paleontologist Philippe Taquet had visitors in his lab at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Horacio and Isabel Mateus, amateur fossil hunters, came in with a set of tiny bones. They had been walking with their daughter, Marta, along a seaside cliff northwest of Lisbon when Marta came across what looked like black pottery shards. The Mateuses recognized them as fossilized eggshells and soon found bones nearby. Taquet realized they were no ordinary bones. I saw immediately they were very small bones of dinosaurs, so I rushed to Portugal, he says.
There he joined a group of Portuguese paleontologists who had also seen the fossils found by the Mateus family. In the first block of 34 eggs there was one egg, crushed open, says Taquet. We could see the embryo inside perfectly. There were some fragments of vertebrae attached to the inside of ...
