Recent decades have seen a huge increase in the number and diversity of fossil eggs collected, including now all seven continents. A feature frequently seen on non-avian dinosaur eggs, much more so than modern bird eggs, is an external sculpturing of the eggshell surface known as ornamentation. This ornamentation takes on a variety of forms, particularly when including recent finds. The variation is most extreme within oviraprotosaurs, driven by processes beyond phylogeny. A single nest can exhibit remarkable ornamentation differences that are not measurable using the existing categorization system.
I have been developing a new method of quantitatively measuring ornamentation using high resolution surface scans and analysis from the R package molaR. This method was previously applied to dentition, na dits use on eggshell could 1) reveal underlying reasons for differentiated ornamentation within taxa, and 2) open other paleontological surfaces to quantitative analysis.