The researchers began by plotting the shape—as defined by the pole-to-pole asymmetry and the ellipticity—of some 50,000 eggs, representing 14 percent of species in 35 orders, including two ...

Insect eggs range across eight orders of magnitude in size, and come in a stunning variety of shapes, a new database of almost 10,500 descriptions of eggs from about 6,700 insect species shows.

The new study, led by evolutionary biologist Mary Stoddard from Princeton University, considered vast amounts of data to understand what, exactly, determines the shape of an egg. Stoddard and her ...

Shape spread By examining the eggs of 1,400 species (each species’ average egg is represented on this scatterplot by a pale orange dot), researchers found that the shape of bird eggs is ...

(He wasn’t.) To crack the mystery about egg shapes, Princeton University evolutionary biologist Mary Caswell Stoddard and her colleagues examined almost 50,000 eggs from more than 1,400 species.

Mary Caswell Stoddard, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton, proposes a far-ranging hypothesis regarding how and why bird eggs acquire their shapes ...

Eggs evolved over 300 million years ago and now come in all kinds of shapes, from Tic Tacs to teardrops to pingpong balls. After studying some 50,000 eggs, a team of researchers thinks it knows why.