Eggs and duck eggs have all been seen, but have you ever seen dinosaur eggs? A few days ago, Consultant Zhao heard a strange thing, a rural uncle in Shiyan City, Hubei Province, dug out a nest of dinosaur eggs in his backyard!
According to the villager Uncle Wang, he planned to build a cattle pen behind his house, but due to the limited space, he decided to excavate part of the mountain. When he operated the excavator, he dug out 3 round knots of similar size in a digging pit (pictured below).
Uncle Wang felt strange and studied it repeatedly, but did not see a reason for it. Just then the neighbor came over, and after taking a closer look at the round bump, he said, "This may be a dinosaur egg fossil." ”
Uncle Wang did not dare to be careless, and hurriedly reported to the relevant departments, and a few days later, geological experts rushed to the village and dug up a nest of 30 dinosaur egg fossils at Uncle Wang's house. According to preliminary expert identification, these dinosaur eggs belong to the flat round egg class, which was born in the Upper Cretaceous period about 100 million years ago.
Dinosaurs are the most well-known extinct ancient creatures, an important fossil for the study of the dinosaur era, the most eye-catching, precious.
So far incomplete statistics, human beings have found dinosaur eggs all over the world except Oceania and Antarctica, and a total of no less than 53 egg-laying sites (as shown above) and no less than 400 dinosaur egg fossils have been found in China, ranking the highest in the world.
Dinosaur eggs are found in China mainly in the central and eastern regions, such as Shandong, Hubei, Henan, Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Guangdong provinces.
The first batch of dinosaur egg fossils in China was found in 1922 on the southwestern edge of the Gobi Desert in northern Xinjiang, when several litters of 10 or so were found, with a total of 70 to 80 pieces, each of which was unusually hard.
According to expert research, these eggs are born of a small dinosaur, no more than 1 meter long, called protocerapidosaurus.
Oviraptorosaurus dinosaur egg (found in Mongolian Gobi)
Model of the original horned dragon skeleton
In 1984, a 65-million-year-old "dinosaur egg nest" fossil was unearthed in China. This fossil of a "dinosaur egg nest" is intact and extremely precious. However, after it was unearthed, it was lost to the outside world several times.
In 2003, an American collector bought the "dinosaur egg nest" for $420,000 at a public auction in the United States, and then returned it to China free of charge through multi-party negotiations.
Dinosaurs, according to food habits can be divided into plant-eating, carnivorous two kinds of dinosaurs, the eggs of the two kinds of dinosaurs are also very different, plant-eating dinosaur eggs are round, carnivorous dinosaur eggs are flat.
Plant-feeding dinosaur eggs
Carnivorous dinosaur eggs
From the perspective of the integrity of dinosaur eggs, it can be divided into two categories: one is dinosaur eggshell fossils, and the other is complete dinosaur egg fossils.
A considerable part of the complete dinosaur egg fossil contains embryos. Dinosaur egg fossils can be produced in a nest-like pattern and arranged in an orderly manner.
Dinosaur egg fossils can generally come in black, yellow, blue, gray, brown, red and other different colors. Its shape is flattened and round like a gall, commonly known as "stone gall", and looks like an inverted turtle cover.
Dinosaur egg fossils are rare treasures that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and have very high scientific value, ornamental value, and collection value, and the complete preservation of dinosaur egg fossils, with a market price of at least 3 million yuan or more per piece.
Although the value of dinosaur egg fossils is not cheap, but for dinosaur egg fossils, it is not possible to dig themselves, if it has belonged to personal collection, it can never be taken abroad or traded, although dinosaur egg fossils do not resemble cultural relics, but classified as land resources management ranks.