"43 BLUE" fossilised dinosaur eggs were found in China during road repair work in Heyuan city in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. Guys, it doesn't get any better than this as far as finding over a million-year-old Dinosaur eggs, because not only have the eggs still got their original colours but some of them are "19" fully intact eggs.
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That means that there could be tiny skeletal remains of a miniature dinosaur inside the egg, and who knows we could get some DNA from the preserved eggs? It could be a fascinating time or a disappointing time for scientists.
But still, just finding the eggs was a stroke of luck because the actual area where they were found had been under a road for a long time. China has been undertaking one of the world's biggest construction phases in history with its infrastructure growing rapidly, and so expect more amazing finds as China grows.
China has given up some ancient and historic paleontological discoveries over the years, but this one has given up 43 dinosaur eggs! WOW! That's mind-blowing stuff, right? Get this, some museums and organisations haven't even got 10 or 20 Dinosaur examples let alone 43 Dinosaur specimens - so this recent discovery has to be world-ranked as an all-time great just for the sheer size of the treasure trove of natural curiosity wonders? Well, that's how I would describe it.
The city of Heyuan, Guangdong Province, which has rightfully earned itself the nickname “hometown of the dinosaur.” According to city authorities, more than 17,000 fragments of dinosaur eggs have been discovered since the mid-1990s, when a group of schoolboys unearthed the first specimens at a building site after mistaking them for stones. This staggering number of finds has landed Heyuan a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the city with the largest known collection of dinosaur eggs.
Because of the scientific importance of such discoveries, Du Yanil, director of the city’s Dinosaur Museum, in Guangdong, China thinks that construction projects should be stopped if fossils are unearthed at building sites, which could be problematic since he believes there are probably many more to be found in the city’s sandstone beds. In China, it’s illegal not to report discoveries such as this to the authorities. Just over a decade ago, a farmer in Heuyan was detained after police discovered a stash of 557 fossilized dinosaur eggs at his home.
Heyuan City was honoured by the China Geological Survey's Stratum and Palaeontology Center as 40 palaeontologists from China, the US, France, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Canada and Belgium attended the first Heyuan International Dinosaur Seminar. According to Professor Zhao Zikui from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology, dinosaur egg fossils unearthed in China account for one-third of the total found in the world.
And that is just stunning! Humans started in Africa, and this would suggest to me that dinosaurs started in China. Bu. Just because there has been an abundant amount of Dinosaurs eggs found in China, specifically in this city of Heyuan, doesn't mean they started altogether from there, but it is a starting point. Instead of having no idea where dinosaurs started off life, this gives us a tangible place to start the investigation, right? I would rather have something to investigate as opposed to having nothing to investigate!
The fossils unearthed in Heyuan all come from the late Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago. Of them, seven are of a member of the oviraptor family named Heyuannia huangi, described by Lu Junchang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2003 and since appraised as a first-class state cultural relic. It is reported that the city signed a one billion yuan (US$121 million) contract with the Guangsheng Company last year to develop the dinosaur site park within five years. It will aim to reflect the excavation and research achievements there, making it a base for educating and popularising science as well as an amusement park.
More information can be found here at IFLSCIENCE.
