Jakarta –
Agate beautiful pink color with white stripes kept in the Natural History Museum (NHM), London’s Mineralogy Collection since 1883, is known to be dinosaur eggs 60 million years old.
This object, about 15cm wide and almost entirely in the shape of a simple ball, is a specimen in the museum’s collection for the last 175 years. A recent study finally revealed that it was a dinosaur egg.
The interior color of this specimen caught the attention of Robin Hansen, one of the mineral section curators at NHM who helped prepare the specimen when it was selected for exhibition in 2018. Later, a trip to a mineral exhibition in France helped reveal just how important the stone was.
“While I was looking at the show, someone showed me an agatized dinosaur egg, which is round, has a thin shell, and a dark agate stone in the center,” Hansen said.
“That was the moment when I thought: ‘Wait, this is very similar to the one we just displayed at the Museum!’,” he said as quoted by IFL Science.
The mineral was then examined by the museum’s dinosaur curators, Professor Paul Barrett and Dr Susie Maidment who decided to carry out a CT scan on the specimen to see what clues they could reveal.
Unfortunately, the density of the agate means that CT scans cannot find finer details. On the positive side, the team agrees that the thin layer around the agate looks like a shell. Then they discovered that the exterior of the specimen showed more than one object had been assembled.
Additionally, the specimen was collected in India and its size, shape and surface features are the same as other titanosaur egg specimens from China and Argentina.
The eggs are thought to date from 60 million years ago when titanosaurs were still the most common dinosaurs living in India. Titanosaurus, despite its enormous size, is thought to have laid around 30-40 eggs.
This specimen is a perfect example of why museum collections are so important. “This stone was correctly identified and cataloged as agate in 1883 using the scientific knowledge available at the time,” Hansen explained.
“Only now do we realize that this specimen has something special. Agate has filled this spherical structure, which turns out to be a dinosaur egg,” he said again.
The team suspects that this occurred due to volcanic activity which caused the eggs to be encased in volcanic rock which hardened after the eruption.
Its internal structure would eventually rot, and silica-rich water would flow through the rock and into the egg cavity, creating the banded agate specimens that appear as streaks as they do today.
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2023-12-07 06:45:05
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