As any child can tell you, dinosaurs, not birds, invented feathers. According to a new scientific report, dinosaurs also invented — or, if you want to get technical, first evolved — eggs of different colors. Birds did not evolve their egg colors on their own, but inherited the ability from non-avian dinosaurs.

Until a few years ago, the color of dinosaur eggs was unknown. Other reptiles, like snakes and turtles, usually lay off-white eggs. Then, in 2015, Jasmina Wiemann and colleagues reported the presence of two pigments, one blue-green and one red, in oviraptor eggs.

But that was one dinosaur. Ms. Wiemann, a graduate student at Yale University went on to work with Mark Norell, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, to develop a nondestructive method for identifying pigments. They tested fossilized eggshells from 14 different dinosaurs and also ancient and modern birds.

In the new report published Wednesday in Nature, they write that they found a red-brown pigment called protoporphyrin IX and a blue-green one called biliverdin5 in both modern birds and in a group of dinosaurs that were ancestors of modern birds — Eumaniraptorans, including favorites like velociraptor. They were also found at the same depths from the surface in the shells of modern and ancient birds and non-avian dinosaurs.