Have You Found a Dinosaur Egg

People who think they have found dinosaur eggs in their backyards usually have been doing foundation work or laying a new sewer pipe  and have dislodged eggs from their nesting place a foot or two underground. Most of these people are simply curious, but a few have hopes of making money from the find, dreaming of natural history museums engaging in bidding wars. The  chance of success, however, is slim. Dinosaur Eggs Are Extremely  Rare The average person might be forgiven for believing that he has accidentally unearthed a cache of fossilized dinosaur eggs. Paleontologists dig up the bones of adult dinosaurs all the time, so shouldnt females eggs be as common a finding? The fact is that dinosaur eggs are only rarely preserved. An abandoned nest probably would have attracted predators, which would have cracked them open, feasted on the contents, and scattered the fragile eggshells. But the vast majority of eggs probably would have hatched, leaving behind a pile of fractured eggshells. Paleontologists do sometimes find fossilized dinosaur eggs. Egg Mountain in Nebraska has yielded numerous clutches, or nests,  of Maiasaura eggs, and elsewhere in the American West researchers have identified troodon and Hypacrosaurus eggs. One of the most famous clutches, from central Asia, belonged to a fossilized velociraptor mother, probably buried by a sudden sandstorm as she was brooding her eggs. If They Arent Dinosaur Eggs, What Are They? Most such clutches are simply  a collection of smooth, round rocks that have been eroded over millions of years into vaguely ovoid shapes. Or they may be chicken eggs, perhaps buried 200 years previously in a flood. Or they could have come from turkeys, owls, or,  if found in Australia or New Zealand, ostriches or emus. They almost certainly were laid by a bird, not a dinosaur. If you think they look like pictures youve seen of velociraptor eggs, you should know that velociraptors were native only to Inner Mongolia. There is still  a slight chance that what youve found  are dinosaur eggs. You or an expert would have to figure out whether any of the geologic sediments in your area date back to the Mesozoic Era, from about 250 million to 65 million years ago. Many regions of the world have yielded fossils older than 250 million years, before dinosaurs evolved, or less than a few million years, long after dinosaurs went  extinct. That would reduce the odds of your having found dinosaur eggs to almost exactly zero. Ask an Expert If you live near a natural history museum or a university with a paleontology department, a curator or paleontologist might be willing to look at your discovery, but be patient. It might take a busy professional weeks or months to get around to looking at your pictures or the egg itself and then breaking the bad news that it isnt what you had hoped it was.