Thursday 23 June 2022 09:11 PM Dinosaur with oldest EVER 'belly button' seen in 125-million-year-old fossil ... trends now
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The oldest belly button ever was found by paleontologists on a 125-million-year-old fossil of a biped in China.
The barely perceptible navel mark belongs to a reptile in the genus Psittacosaurus that lived in the Cretaceous period.
Researchers note that dinosaurs did not have umbilical cords, unlike humans, because they laid eggs.
A 3D reconstruction of a reclining Psittacosaurus showing the long umbilical scar surrounded by distinctive scales that was identified by study team
Instead, the yolk sac of dinosaurs was directly attached to the body via a slit-like opening, also found in other egg-laying land animals.
It is this opening that sealed up at about the time the animal hatches, leaving a distinctive long umbilical scar.
While the egg-laying nature of dinosaurs predicts a long belly button scar, this study is the first to support this hypothesis with fossil