Why scramble a good design?

Natural History, May, 2005 by Nick W. Atkinson

70,000,000 B.C. -- Rotten eggs are bad enough when they come from chickens, so imagine the smell of a 70-million-year-old dinosaur egg. But a team of paleontologists led by Mary H. Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh was not about to let the "petroliferous odour" keep them from examining the shells of a few astonishingly well preserved eggs deposited by the giant Argentinian dinos known as titanosaurs.

Ancient floods deposited silty mud around some clutches of the eggs, fossilizing them almost instantly. The process left the skeletal remains and even some of the soft tissues of the eggs' ill-fated embryonic contents visible in exquisite detail. Schweitzer and her colleagues were able to investigate not only the details of the eggs' structure, but also their molecular makeup and even the immunological reactions they provoked. Titanosaur eggs, they found, weren't much different from those of their closest living relatives, birds and reptiles. It seems evolution is well acquainted with rule zero of the indolent engineer: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2004.2876, 2005)