Beijing's Tsinghua University think they have a better solution, though. They've developed transparent artificial bird eggs that mimic the real deal while showing every single nuance of the embryo's development. The key is a special process that gives an organic polymer the same shape as an egg, offering the avian a relatively natural environment that's easier to work with in a lab.
These shells are more than a little eerie, as you'll see in the video below, but they could be crucial to understanding life processes. They promise a reliable way to observe the development of egg-laying creatures, including the effects of treatments and rare genes. While these see-through eggshells won't help much with studying humans and other mammals, the discoveries they allow could help biology as a whole.
