Look at the nail of your pinky finger. That’s about the width of the biggest known insect egg, which belongs to the earth-borer beetle Bolboleaus hiaticollis. The smallest egg, from the wasp ...

The evolution of the amniotic egg -- complete with membrane and shell -- was key to vertebrates leaving the oceans and colonizing the land and air. Now, 360 million years later, bird eggs come in all ...

The mystery of why birds’ eggs come in so many shapes has long been up in the air. Now new research suggests adaptations for flight may have helped shape the orbs. Stronger fliers tend to lay more ...

Some of life’s simplest questions get swept under the rug for a long time—after all, the most widespread phenomena often require the most data to understand. Take the shape of the boring egg, for ...

Q. I saw a photo of different kinds of bird eggs and noted not only the obvious, that smaller birds lay smaller eggs, but also that some bird eggs are elongate whereas others are more rounded. What is ...

When Mary Caswell Stoddard started measuring bird eggs from hundreds of species, she wasn’t expecting to learn that most eggs are not egg-shaped. Think about an egg and you’ll probably conjure up an ...