DINOSAUR EGGS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19058, 10 July 1924, Page 3

DINOSAUR EGGS.

SOLD FOR £lovo EACH. The news that the American Museum of Natural History has sold for £lOOO one of its dinosaur eggs which were found in the Gobi Desert reminds one that to-day the popular interest in natural history is so great that enormous pains 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 n. prodigious reptilian fauna, and it is a very curious fact that the finest collections of remains of these water-lov-ing creatures are found in what to-day are almost waterless deserts. The 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 s laso beleved that man first came nto existence on the shores of this sea.

| Another enormous graveyard of mon* ister lizards exists in the North Amcrl--1 can 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 fossil bones, most of i them being fragments of the brontosaurus, perhaps the largest land an’ nial that ever existed. A reconstruction of the brontosaur show it to have been from 60ft to 70ft in length. Its thigh bone alone weighed 6001 b, and is whole weight in life could hardly have been short of 25 tons. Lizards of various sorts —some herbivorous, some ; flesh-eating—crocodiles of giant size, and mammoth turtles were also dis- * covered, as well as bones of the ancesi tor of our present horse.

| In the Libyan Desert of Africa the ! sand waves cover huge skeletons, including those of elephants twice the t size of any known to-day. In Texas, too, there are great deposits of fossilised bones. Finding prehistoric skeletons is 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.