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 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 ...

One of nature's most efficient life-support systems is the egg. Eggs evolved over 300 million years ago as vertebrate animals adapted to living on land. And since then, they've taken on numerous ...

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 ...

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 ...

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