DINOSAUR EGGS

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 146, 21 June 1924, Page 16

DINOSAUR EGGS

SOLD FOR ONE THOUSAND

POUNDS EACH.

The news that the American Museum of Natural History has sold for £1000 one of its dinosaur eggs which were found in the Gobi Desert reminds one that to-day the popular interest m natural history is so great that enormous p^ins are being taken to reconstruct the history of the past from the marvellous remains which are to be found buried in the skin of this planet of ours! Of past epochs,' says Christopher Beck in the "Daily Mail," none has proved more intensely interesting than the Mesozoic, that age when the' world was inhabited by a prodigious reptilian fauna, and it is a very curious fact that I>he finest collections of remains of these water-loving creatures are found in what tp-day are almost waterless deserts.' TJie Gobi Desert is one" of the driest places known, and most of it lies at a; great height above the sea. Yet it is fairly certain that it is actually the- bed of an ancient ocean, and it fs also believed that man first came into existence on the shores of this sea.

Another enormous graveyard of monster lizards exists in the North American State of Wyoming, a desert country. Bone Cabin, Wyoming, is known to palaeontologists all the world over by reason of the amazing discoveries made there of gigantic fossil bones, most of them being fragments of the brontosaurus, perhaps the largest laud animal that ever existed. A reconstruction cf the brontosaur shows it to have been from sixty to seventy feet in length. ' Its "thigh bone alone weighed sur hundred pounds, and its whole weight in life could hardly have been short of twentyfrve tons. Lizards of various sorts— some herbivorous, some fl«h-eating— crocodiles of giant size, and mammoth turtles were also discovered, as well as bones of the ancestor of our present horse.

In the Libyan Desert of Africa the sand waves cover huge skeletons, including those of elephants twice the size of any known to-d.ay. In Texas, too, there are great deposits of fossilised bones. _ Finding prehistoric skeletons as one . thing; securing and packing them another. They are not only huge and cumbersome but also brittle. It is usually necessary to fill the cracks in a bone with liquid plaster before it is crated. Often the whole piece must be covered with plaster before it can be packed and carted away.