Exciting examples of physics principles illuminate the power and scope of our discipline. In this paper, we discuss a conservation of energy example for an introductory course. Energy conservation is applied to bird and dinosaur eggs to derive a method to predict the incubation period and the embryonic metabolism solely from the egg geometry. The power of this fundamental principle to yield insights into a biological example helps to demonstrate the utility of conservation of energy.

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.
Replicas of chicken eggs are available in commercial stores (particularly close to Easter) and online stores.
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Supplementary Material

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