Noël van Hooft
In collaboration with
Brabant broadcasting
ANNOUNCEMENTS•
The Oertijdmuseum in Boxtel may have a very rare object in its collection: a fossilized dinosaur embryo. The museum has been scanning dinosaur eggs at the Jeroen Bosch hospital in Den Bosch in hopes of finding embryos. One egg showed petrified pieces. Maarten de Rijke, curator of the museum, takes on an embryo.
In exchange for Brabant broadcasting De Rijke speaks of “world news”, because there are not yet ten such embryos on earth. The seventy-million-year-old egg will be taken to Switzerland, where it will be further examined with even better equipment.
This time there were no patients in the CT scan at Jeroen Bosch hospital, but dinosaur eggs:
This is what a dinosaur embryo looks like
Something has also been found in two other eggs, but indications that it is an embryo are not as clear as with the first egg, says De Rijke. He says it took him five years to get the documents to have the eggs examined at the hospital.
The museum wants to use the embryos to see how a dinosaur developed in an egg. “We want to show that eggs contain embryos or bones from embryos. This will allow us to get a better picture of dinosaur development in the egg. Very little is known about this yet.”
The Oertijdmuseum has a total of 182 eggs in its collection, from France, Spain and Mongolia. Some of them have been selected for research.
