Cracking a developmental constraint: egg size and bird evolution. In Proceedings of the VII International Meeting of the Society of Avian Paleontology and Evolution, ed. W.E. Boles and T.H. Worthy

It has been suggested that relative egg size in living birds is strongly correlated with the developmental mode of the young; "altricial" (helpless) or "precocial" (independent). Using a data set of extant taxa we show that altricial birds lay relatively larger eggs than their precocial counterparts but that this may be due to the small size of most altricial species. Smaller birds tend to lay relatively small eggs compared to large species....