Early pregnancy - a phenomenon that is also common among dinosaurs

A type of bone marrow active in the body of female birds during reproduction has been discovered in the remains of young dinosaurs, which indicates that the phenomenon of reproductive ability at a young age is rooted far down in evolution.

The problem of teenage pregnancy is not a new invention, it already appeared in some dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago. Bone marrow, a type of tissue found in modern birds when they develop in an egg, was found in three dinosaur fossils. This is what the researchers reported on Monday in the online issue of the journal "Records of the National Academy of Sciences" (PNAS).

The dinosaurs were 8, 10 and 18 years old, and this indicates that they reached sexual maturity earlier than previously thought. In today's birds, the bone marrow straightens the braids for a few weeks while the females produce the eggs and then the material is reabsorbed by the body. The discovery of the material in dinosaur fossils, which researchers now believe are the ancestors of birds, sheds light on their reproductive behaviors. The researchers believe that most of the dinosaurs lived up to the age of 30, although there were some that reached the age of 60.

The research was led by Sarah Warning and Andrew Lee, both PhD students at the University of California, Berkeley. Lee is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Ohio State University School of Osteopathic Medicine.

"This is an exciting finding, because the age of sexual maturity is determined by so many variables," says Prof. Kevin Padian, an expert in integrative biology and curator of the Peregly University Museum of Paleontology, who advised the researchers.

Warning writes in an announcement published by the university that an accurate detection of the age of sexual maturity opens up complementary ways for the study of dinosaurs. It will be possible to talk about the physiology of the dinosaurs, their lifespan, reproductive strategy and more. These techniques can also be used to examine these traits among a wide variety of extinct animals.

The bones that Warning and Lee studied were of Allosaurus - a meat-eating dinosaur; And Tenontosaurus - a vegetarian dinosaur. The finding also holds true for Tyrannosaurus rex, they say. The research was done by the Geological Society of America, the Paleontological Society and the University of Oklahoma; The Jurassic Foundation and the Department of Integrative Biology of the University of California at Berkeley.