OLDER THAN HISTORY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 10 November 1925, Page 7

OLDER THAN HISTORY.

EGGS LAID BY DINOSAUBS.

DISCOVERIES BY HUNTERS.

So many of those eggs which the prudent dinosaur laid in the sands of Mongolia ten million wears ago have been found by the Third Asiatic Expedition, which AA-ent to seek them, that there are noAV enough to go round to every naturae history museum in the world, says a London paper. Actually the search for them began at least 15,000 years ago. About that time, Avhen the reindeer men were grubbing in their #aves ip iccclad Europe, a happy, careless tribe of people Jived under the tamarisk trees of the sand dunes of Avestern China. The tamarisks still spread tlieir feathery boughs over Shabrack, Ussu, which is what the Mongolians now call this patch of tlie desert, but the people of that old time have long ago left it. The name, the recollection of them, vanished before history began, but they left their spears and arroAV-hcads, and the needles with which their women sewed the skins of beasts, to be a memorial of their existence and to afford a clue as to what, manner of people they Avere. But they left something else as avcll. They left tlie •women’s necklaces, made of pieces of the ten million-year-old dinosaur eggs! These primitive people, aa-Jio had never seen iron or bronze, and Avho had not the vestige of a notion what a fossil meant, had light-heartedly dug about the graveyard of the monstrous dinosaurs, and found there nice little pieces of a material Avhich could be chipped into shape and strung on a necklace for a charm. They know most likely that they Avere eggs, for they used also to string pieces of the shell of the giant ostrich, AVhicli is extinct.

The stone weapons and implements used by these people were of red jasper and chalcedony, and are chipped in the same Avay as those of the men who lived in Avestern Europe at the end of the. fee Age. It is suggested that these Stone Mon of Mongolia migrated from Mongolia and Avandered to Europe. They may have brought their precious eggs with them. Among tlie relies of the earliest Stone Age men avlkv came to Europe, Sir Flinders Petrie found an ostrich egg which had been broken and afterwards riveted!

The egg is accepted as the symbol 01 life by some ancient race's. The Dune Dwellers of the Gobi Desert must have been nigh lo worshipping a perfect one when they found it.

Dinosaur eggs were certainly plentiful enough. An American explorer leaning over the brink of a high cliff cut his hand on the, edge of one. A line of eggshells springing like crocuses out of the ground led another explorer to a clutch of five smooth-surfaced ones. Yet another was a clutch of twelve eggs arranged in a circle exactly as the old dinosaur hen laid them so fondly all those millions of years ago.

This remarkable clutch of twelve eggs has survived the extinction of the dinosaurs and the crumpling of Asia into the Himalayas, a thought which reminds one of the egg that was found unbroken in the ruins of Pompeii. Hate in their history they escaped the groping hands of the dune dwellers of taramisk town, and they are now a pago of history themselves.