What went wrong? ***GRAPHIC PICS***

I have 13 Button quails on day 18 3 pipped at the wrong bit of the egg and died and the rest seemed like quitters so I opened them on the off chance I could save one or at least figure out what was wrong. I started incubating in my hovabator but the humidity was way too high no matter what I did so I switched them to my big incubator a week ago and temp and humidity were perfect.This is what I found.


It has no skull on the top and its top beak is about half the size of the bottom one.

This one is the same age as the last but seriously underdeveloped

This one is underdeveloped too but the yolk was attached to its back.
1 and 2 are still alive in the incubator I thought they would just pass fairly quickly on their own but its been over an hour and their still going.
The inside of all the eggs was thick and jelly like. I think it was the high humidity at the beginning but would that have caused the deformity's?

not sure just my opinion looks like they werent ready to hatch yet.... sorry

It's not probable that a high humidity caused deformities at an early stage. High humidity tends to affect the later stages; bloating the flesh or leaking into the air cell or not allowing enough liquid to evaporate through the shell, leaving a tiny air cell... things like that. Typically incubator-caused deformities at a young age are a result of high or low temperatures- high temps cause accelerated growth at a rate the chick can't cope with, and low temperatures slow the development, sometimes of one part or another.

If your temp was stable, on target, and your thermometers were working properly, the what you're looking at in these pictures is more likely genetic- especially the bare skull. The yolk stuck to the back could be a result of improper storage before incubation or a result of bad turning during incubation, so that the embryo got stuck to a side with the yolk 'behind' it... but it could also be rotten luck or bad genetics.

The two under-developed ones are probably not under-developed.... they probably died early on.

All of them were alive and kicking around!
I did get them from Ebay so at the minute I'm leaning towards genetics the other eggs were all perfectly formed, yolks absorbed but dead in the shell. I think I'll stick to getting eggs from breeders that I know in future.
I had other eggs that I set to hatch at the same time and they are all fine it was just this batch that didn't make it

I posted pics of a similar event of no skull in a chick. I was having problems with the temperature and mostly humidity being to low during most of the incubation. Maybe that is the cause. I had 12 eggs and only 2 chicks out of them all. There was one that pipped way too early on the wrong end of the shell. When I opened it up it still had a sizable yolk attached. It was lock down day that I noticed it. I had put them in lock down 2 days early due to lack of space in my bators. I read that they can go in lock down as early as a week. So I figured a few days would be ok. I've had to do the same with the next set but i'll make sure to turn these.