WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists have unearthed the first fossils of soft-shelled eggs laid by dinosaurs – two disparate species from Argentina and Mongolia – in a discovery suggesting that the earliest dinosaurs produced such eggs before some lineages turned to hard shells.

The embryo-containing eggs – leathery on the outside rather than hard and calcified like those of birds – belonged to a dinosaur from Patagonia called Mussaurus from about 200 million years ago and one called Protoceratops from the Gobi Desert from about 75 million years ago, researchers said on Wednesday.

It had long been thought that all dinosaurs laid hard-shelled eggs, as modern birds – the descendants of feathered dinosaurs – and crocodilians do. Many turtles, lizards and snakes lay soft-shelled eggs. But relatively few dinosaurs eggs had ever been found, and those belonged to only a handful of dinosaur groups including the meat-eaters.

Finding soft-shelled eggs in such dissimilar species living far apart in time and location indicates, the researchers said, that many lineages including the first dinosaurs to appear 230 million years ago may have laid such eggs. Soft-shelled eggs are not readily preserved as fossils.

Twenty-foot-long (6 meters) Mussaurus was an early member of the sauropod lineage of long-necked plant-eaters. Its 5-inch (13-cm) egg was rather spherical.

Sheep-sized herbivore Protoceratops was a member of the ceratopsian lineage of beaked dinosaurs, many of which had horns though not this one. Its 4-inch (10-cm) eggs were more oblong.

“This gives us a new perspective of the reproductive biology of dinosaurs, indicating that the basal dinosaurs (most primitive forms) were more primitive reptilian in their reproductive habits,” said paleontologist Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, lead author of the research published in the journal Nature.

“This means that they laid soft-shelled eggs which were probably buried in the sand or in vegetation. It also explains why fossil calcified eggs are only known from a few groups of dinosaurs, and only appear long after the origin of the group.”

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The fossilized egg – measuring 8 by 11 inches (29 by 20 cm) – is only slightly smaller than eggs of Madagascar’s giant flightless elephant birds that went extinct only in the past several centuries, scientists said on Wednesday.

While birds, crocodilians and many dinosaurs laid hard-shelled eggs, the Antarctic egg had a soft, parchment-like shell.

“This new egg is the very first fossil egg from Antarctica, and the largest soft-shelled egg ever discovered,” said University of Texas paleontologist Lucas Legendre, lead author of the research published in the journal Nature.

“It looks a bit like a deflated football: elongated, collapsed, with many creases and folds on its surface. One side is flattened, suggesting this is where it came in contact with the sea floor. Its eggshell is very thin and poorly mineralized, like in the eggs of lizard and snakes.”

The only creatures in Antarctica at that time large enough to lay such an egg were seagoing reptiles: the marine lizards called mosasaurs and the long-necked plesiosaurs. The fossil challenges the notion that these animals did not lay eggs and were fully viviparous, giving birth to live young.

“We suspect these large reptiles had the same reproductive strategy as viviparous lizards and snakes, which lay eggs with a very thin shell that hatch immediately after being laid,” Legendre said.

The egg had no embryonic remains and the mother’s skeleton was not found to identify what animal laid it. Among the candidates are species of mosasaurs reaching 50 feet (15 meters) long and plesiosaurs reaching 33 feet (10 meters) long, Legendre said.

Mosasaurs and plesiosaurs went extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs after an asteroid struck Earth 66 million years ago.

Scientists from the University of Chile and the country’s Museum of Natural History found the fossil in 2011. Initially bewildered by it, they nicknamed it “The Thing,” after the name of a science-fiction film.

“When we arrived at camp we asked the geologists that accompanied us if they had ever seen anything like it,” said University of Chile paleontology researcher Rodrigo Otero. “Their expression of bewilderment said it all.”

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BEIJING (Reuters) – China indefinitely postponed on Tuesday the launch of the final satellite of its Beidou navigation network because of technical problems in the rocket meant to launch it into orbit.

The official website for the Beidou network said in a statement that problems were detected during pre-launch tests of the Long March-3B booster and that the new launch date would be determined later. It did not offer specifics on the problems or the launch date.

The Beidou-3 satellite was expected to be the 35th and final satellite of the Chinese navigation system – an estimated $10 billion project meant to be Beijing’s answer to the U.S.-owned Global Positioning System.

When completed, China says, the system will keep military communications secure and improve weapons targeting, especially in the Asia-Pacific region.

Beidou also has major civilian applications. More than 70% of mobile phones in China were Beidou-enabled as of 2019, state media reported, including models made by Huawei [HWT.UL], Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo and Samsung. Millions of taxis, buses and trucks use Beidou signals.

China’s satellite navigation sector may top 400 billion yuan ($57 billion) in value this year, Chinese state media have reported.

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(Reuters) – Houston-based engineering company KBR Inc said on Monday it was awarded a $570.3 million contract by NASA to develop and execute spaceflight operations at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Under the contract, KBR will perform International Space Station payload operations and support the testing of NASA’s flagship space launch system.

NASA is leaning heavily on private companies built around shared visions for space exploration, as it gears up for a long-term presence on the moon and prepares for a manned mission to Mars.

The space launch system, set to debut next year, is currently NASA’s ride for transporting humans from the Earth to the moon by 2024.

KBR, which until April 2007 was the engineering and construction arm of oilfield services giant Halliburton Co, said on Monday its work would support various NASA programs, payload developers, educational institutions, international partner space agencies and commercial partners.

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BANGKOK (Reuters) – Researchers in Thailand began collecting samples from horseshoe bats to test them for coronavirus amid concerns they may pose a threat to local residents, a government statement said on Saturday.

They plan to collect 300 bats over three days from a cave in the Chanthaburi province in the southeast of the country. The bats will be released following the tests.

Thailand has 23 species of the horseshoe bat, but there has not been an investigation before.

The source of the virus remains a matter of debate after it emerged in China late last year.

The World Health Organization (WHO) in April said that all available evidence suggests that it originated in bats in China, but it was not clear how the virus had jumped the species barrier to humans.

The research team in Thailand includes Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, who identified the country’s first case of COVID-19 in January.

“The reason we need to investigate the horseshoe bat is because there are reports from China that the COVID-19 virus is similar to the virus found in the horseshoe bat,” Supaporn said.

Thailand was the first country outside China to record a case of the virus. It has so far reported 3,134 cases and 58 deaths.

Researchers from the National Parks Department, Chulalongkorn Hospital and Kasetsart University entered the cave on Thursday evening and re-emerged in the early hours of Friday with samples of bat blood, saliva and feces.

Investigators were concerned that villagers in the area could be at risk of infection.

Locals have been known to eat bats, Supaporn said, adding adequate education and information programs were needed.

Local transmissions have waned in recent weeks with new cases coming from Thais returning from overseas.

(Refiles to add dropped letter in headline)

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POSTOJNA, Slovenia (Reuters) – Three rare aquatic creatures known as baby dragons are going on display in an aquarium at Slovenia’s Postojna Cave, one of the country’s biggest tourist attractions.

The cave-dwelling animals, officially called proteus or olms, have pale pink skin, no eyesight, a long thin body and four legs. They live only in the waters of dark caves of the southern European Karst region.

Local people used to believe the creatures, which were sometimes forced into the open by high water, were the babies of dragons that were believed to live in the caves.

At the Postojna Cave, Europe’s largest cave open to tourists, staff were able to observe the baby dragons being born in 2016.

“We were excited when the eggs were being laid and then had thousands of doubts: how will they survive, what will we feed them with, how will we protect them from infection?” Marjan Batagelj, managing director of the cave, told Reuters.

“Science said they had a 0.5% chance of survival … but we managed to bring up 21 of them,” he added. A total of 64 eggs were laid in 2016.

The babies are up to 14 centimetres (5 inches) long and will reach 30 centimetres (12 inches) when fully grown. Olms can survive up to 8 years without food and have a lifespan of up to 100 years.

A special laboratory has been set up in the cave where the baby dragons are being monitored before they are all presented to the public.

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The idea to develop Beidou, or the Big Dipper in Chinese, took shape in the 1990s as the military sought to reduce reliance on the Global Positioning System (GPS) run by the U.S. Air Force.

When the first Beidou satellites were launched in 2000, coverage was limited to China. As use of mobile devices expanded, China in 2003 tried to join the Galileo satellite navigation project proposed by the European Union but later pulled out to focus on Beidou.

In the age of the iPhone, the second generation of Beidou satellites went operational in 2012, covering the Asia-Pacific.

China began deploying the third generation of satellites aimed at global coverage in 2015.

The 35th and final Beidou-3 satellite will be launched this month – the day has yet to be announced – meaning Beidou has more satellites in its system than GPS’s 31, and more than Galileo and Russia’s GLONASS.

With estimated investment of $10 billion, Beidou keeps the communications network of the Chinese military secure, avoiding the risk of disruption to GPS in the extreme event of conflict.

Weapons targeting and guidance also improves. When complete, Beidou’s location services are accurate down to 10 cm in the Asia-Pacific, compared with GPS’s 30-cm range.

“Beidou was obviously designed a few decades after GPS, so it has had the benefit of learning from the GPS experience,” said Andrew Dempster, director of the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research.

“It has some signals that have higher bandwidth, giving better accuracy. It has fewer orbit planes for the satellites, making constellation maintenance easier.”

SPACE SILK ROAD

Beidou-related services such as port traffic monitoring and disaster mitigation have been exported to about 120 countries, state media reported.

Many of those countries are involved in the Belt and Road initiative, spearheaded by President Xi Jinping to create a modern-day Silk Road of trade and investment.

In a 2019 report, the U.S. congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission warned that China promoted launch services, satellites and Beidou under its “Space Silk Road” to deepen reliance on China for space-based services, potentially at the expense of U.S. influence.

Thailand and Pakistan were the first foreign countries to sign up for Beidou’s services, in 2013.

Within China, more than 70% of mobile phones were Beidou-enabled as of 2019, state media reported, including models made by Huawei [HWT.UL], Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo and Samsung.

Millions of taxis, buses and trucks were also able to receive Beidou signals.

China’s satellite navigation sector may top 400 billion yuan ($57 billion) in value this year, state media said.

Ahead of the Beidou-3 completion, satellite-related shares have soared.

Beijing BDStar Navigation Co, which makes chips that receive Beidou signals, has surged 34.4% this year. Hwa Create leapt 52.3%, outpacing the 7.6% gain in the Shenzhen benchmark.

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SANTIAGO (Reuters) – Chilean and Argentine researchers have unearthed teeth in far-flung Patagonia belonging to a mammal that lived 74 million years ago, the oldest such remains yet discovered in the South American country, the Chilean Antarctic Institute reported on Thursday.

Scientists uncovered the tiny teeth, which belonged to a species called Magallanodon baikashkenke, on a dig near Torres del Paine National Park, a remote area of Patagonia famous for its glacier-capped Andean spires and frigid ocean waters.

The small mammal would have lived in southern Patagonia during the late Cretaceous era, alongside dinosaurs, crocodiles, turtles and birds, according to an article published in the bulletin of the Natural History Museum of Chile.

It is the southernmost record of Gondwanatheria, a group of long-extinct early mammals that co-existed with dinosaurs.

Alexander Vargas, a researcher at the University of Chile, described the mammal as an evolutionary stepping stone between “egg-laying mammals, like the platypus … and marsupial mammals.”

Vargas said the beast was not a rodent but had evolved “rodent-like chewing teeth.”

Gondwanatheria remains from the Cretaceous era are extremely rare, particularly in this part of southern South America, according to the Chilean Antarctic Institute.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A tiny statuette of a bird carved from burnt bone about 13,500 years ago reveals the origins of Chinese art, embodying a style different from prehistoric three-dimensional artwork by people in other parts of the world, researchers said on Wednesday.

The figurine, found at a site called Lingjing in Henan Province in central China, depicts a standing bird on a pedestal and was crafted using stone tools employing four sculpting methods – abrasion, gouging, scraping and incision, the researchers said.

It is the oldest-known three-dimensional art from China and all of East Asia by 8,500 years, although there are primitive abstract engravings on bone and stone and personal ornaments made of animal teeth and shells predating it.

The bird sculpture, the product of an Ice Age hunter-gatherer culture, is six-tenths of an inch (1.5 cm) long, apparently representing a songbird.

“Examining this figurine under the microscope and looking at its high-resolution 3D reconstruction is a moving experience. It opens a window on micro-gestures made by a great artist,” said archeologist Francesco d’Errico of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who is also attached to the Universities of Bordeaux and Bergen.

Humankind’s earliest-known three-dimensional carvings, made of mammoth ivory, date to 40,000 years ago from southern Germany.

The bird was so expertly crafted from the bone of an unidentified mammal that the artist made the tail slightly oversized so the figurine would not fall forward, indicating an understanding of achieving balance, said d’Errico, a senior author of the research published in the journal PLOS ONE.

It is still unclear whether three-dimensional artwork arose independently in various locales or by diffusion from a prehistoric center of origin. The figurine differs in size, style and technology from older and contemporaneous carvings from Europe and Siberia, d’Errico said, suggesting it belongs to a distinctive Chinese artistic tradition.

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LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists have used human embryonic stem cells to create an embryo-like research model to help them study some of the earliest stages of human development.

The model overcomes some of the ethical restrictions on using human embryos for research and will allow scientists to study a period of human development known as the “black box” period, which they say has never been directly observed before.

“Our model produces part of the blueprint of a human,” said Alfonso Martinez-Arias, a professor at Britain’s Cambridge University who co-led the project.

“It’s exciting to witness the developmental processes that until now have been hidden from view – and from study.”

The hope, he said, is that understanding these processes could reveal the causes of human birth defects and diseases, and lead to the development of tests for them in pregnant women.

The blueprint of an organism arises through a process known as “gastrulation”, which in humans begins around two weeks into development. Gastrulation is referred to as the ‘black box’ period of human development, because legal restrictions prevent the culture of human embryos in the lab beyond day 14.

Experts not directly involved in the work – due to be published in the journal Nature on Thursday – said it was an important step towards deepening understanding of human life.

“This work adds to the ‘in vitro toolkit’ that scientists can now use to study the most unknown stages of human pregnancy – between weeks 2 and 4, where women wouldn’t normally know if they are pregnant,” said Teresa Rayon, a specialist at The Francis Crick Institute.

Previous embryo-like models created from mouse stem cells are limited in what they can tell scientists about human development.

For this work, Martinez-Arias’ team made gastruloids in a lab using human embryonic stem cells and treating them with chemical processes.

Gastruloids have no potential to develop into fully-formed embryos. They do not have brain cells or any of the tissues needed for implantation into the womb, which means they would never be viable beyond very early stages and therefore conform to ethical standards, the researchers said.

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