A global search from the deserts of Mongolia to the highlands of Argentina has revealed the first soft-shelled dinosaur eggs ever discovered, providing a new glimpse into how dinosaurs laid their eggs and parented their young. The emerging picture is that, reproductively speaking, the earliest dinosaurs were like modern reptiles, which generally bury their eggs in nests or burrows and don’t stick around to tend them.

The revelation comes from two teams of international researchers, who have presented stunning new fossils of ancient soft-shelled eggs as old as 200 million years. One group describes the first soft eggshells ever identified among dinosaurs, while the other presents the first fossil egg ever discovered in Antarctica—possibly from a marine reptile—which also