It’s a common misconception – led by our familiarity with chicken’s eggs – that birds lay eggs in two colors: brown and white.

But that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, the Cassowary’s eggs are a dark teal shade, whilst – on the smaller end of the scale – the American robin’s much smaller eggs are blue.

If you’ve played the hit board game ‘Wingspan’ you’ll be familiar with the candy-like color of the eggs you can lay on bird cards. But fascinatingly, these brightly colored eggs aren’t far from the truth.

Why? Well, as a study from researchers at Yale, the American Museum of Natural History and the University of Bonn concluded in a study, dinosaurs have a part to play in this.

In their study, which was published in the journal Nature, the scientists explain that the colors of eggs in modern birds – for which blue and red pigments are used – has evolved from non-avian dinosaurs.

To gather this information, the researchers investigated samples of fossilised dinosaur eggshells – including Velociraptor eggs – to determine their pigments.

And the results were clear. Some dinosaurs – namely those that laid their eggs in open and ground nests – evolved pigmentation that would camouflage the eggs from predators, as Jasmina Wiemann explained in a Yale statement:

“We infer that egg color co-evolved with open nesting habits in dinosaurs. Once dinosaurs started to build open nests, exposure of the eggs to visually hunting predators and even nesting parasites favored the evolution of camouflaging egg colors, and individually recognizable patterns of spots and speckles.”

From this groundbreaking discovery, the researchers were able to understand more about how our modern-day bird species evolved to lay such strikingly-colored eggs.

And this vital glimpse into the past has told us more about the species we live alongside today, as Mark Norell from the American Museum of Natural History continued:

“Colored eggs have been considered a unique bird characteristic for over a century. Like feathers and wishbones, we now know that egg color evolved in their dinosaur predecessors long before birds appeared.”

Who knew that eggs could be so beautiful?

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