US, WASHINGTON (ORDO NEWS) — A strange fossil, the size of which reaches the size of a soccer ball, was discovered on the territory of Antarctica and all this time was stored in the Chilean museum. Experts conducted a detailed analysis and found that this fossil is a huge egg that has a soft shell. The egg was laid about 68 million years ago with a huge lizard or a sea snake.
Lucas Legendre, who is the author of the study, said that this discovery could completely change people‘s understanding of how the ancient sea creatures lived.
“It’s almost unrealistic to find soft-shelled eggs that have been so well preserved for so many millions of years,” Legendre says.
This egg is the largest that has ever been discovered by experts. Scientists could not even imagine that eggs can be so huge. They suggest that, most likely, some extinct reptile, which reached enormous sizes, postponed it. Such a finding can be a unique discovery in the field of studying the reproductive function of long-extinct animals.
The fossil was found back in 2011 by Chilean scientists who at that time were working in Antarctica. The find looks like a baked potato. Its dimensions are 18 by 28 centimeters. For several years, experts have unsuccessfully investigated the fossil. And only in 2018 there was an assumption that this could be an egg. After a chemical analysis, it was possible to establish that this is really an egg.
Then it was suggested that the egg could not belong to dinosaurs. Those species that then lived on the territory of Antarctica were not so large as to lay a giant egg. In this region, reptiles of the mozawr group were distributed, which could lay a similar egg.
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