Something very special from our collection, a dinosaur egg! It is the egg of a dinosaur called Hypselosaurus & dates to the Upper Cretaceous period, about 70 million years old!
Hypselosaurus (meaning 'highest lizard') was a titanosaurian sauropod that lived in France. In 1846, Hypselosaurus eggs were the first dinosaur eggs to be discovered, but they were not recognised as being from dinosaurs for several decades, being mistaken for giant bird eggs!
Dinosaur eggs are one of the most commonly misidentified finds for amateur fossil hunters. If you have something at home that you think might be a dinosaur egg, here are some of the ways of identifying them:
And dinosaur eggs are in the news at the moment, with the publication of current research in which scientists have been able to reconstruct the skulls of dinosaurs in fossilised eggs, revealing new information of about their development.