‘Paleoecology’ Winner
The winner of the ‘Paleoecology’ category is a digital image reconstructing a hadrosaur developing within its egg. “The relatively small size of the eggs, and the unspecialized nature of the dinosaur embryos inside, suggest that the earliest hadrosaurs laid small eggs and hatched altricial young,” said Jordan Mallon, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, in a BMC release describing the winning images. “More derived hadrosaurs eventually laid eggs nearly four times larger by volume and hatched correspondingly larger young.”
