Paleontologists at the Natural History Museum in London recently made a stunning announcement. Discovered more than 180 years ago, a stone with a perfectly round agate crystal turned out to be a titanosaurus egg.
As it turned out, the egg was flooded with lava after a volcanic eruption 67 million years ago. A sample of agate, which has been in the museum's collection of mineralogy for the past 135 years, hid an egg shell inside.
The find was made on a volcanic plain in central India. It was precisely this fact that led scientists to the fact that the lava flow destroyed the nest shortly after the dinosaur laid it down.
The embryo decomposed, and layers of hardened volcanic rock preserved its shell. Subsequently, the water that seeped through the shell and crystallized "created" a light pink and white agate mineral.
The author of the find was Charles Fraser, who lived in India between 1817 and 1843. Since 1883, "agate" has been in the catalog of the Natural History Museum of Great Britain.
But it was put on public display only in 2018. It was then that this find repeatedly attracted the attention of paleontologists.
Source: nhm.ac.uk
