How eggs got their shapes: Adaptations for flight may have driven egg-shape variety in birds

From: Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

The evolution of the amniotic egg — complete with membrane and shell — was key to vertebrates leaving the oceans and colonizing the land and air but how bird eggs evolved into so many different shapes and sizes has long been a mystery. Now, an international team of scientists took a quantitative approach to that question and found that adaptations for flight may have been critical drivers of egg-shape variation in birds.

Source: ScienceDaily <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170622143053.htm>