Hundreds of oviraptorosaur nests, each containing dozens of eggs, are known from China and Mongolia, yet only two fragmentary eggs have yet been definitively described from the continent of North America.
That all changed in October, 2017, when a team of paleontologists led by Lindsay Zanno, head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and assistant research professor at N.C. State University, recovered a clutch of more than eight football-sized oviraptorosaur eggs, from sediments deposited during the Late Cretaceous around 97 million years ago.
“This is the first time we found a clutch of oviraptorosaur eggs on the North American continent,” Zanno says, “it’s incredibly exciting for us.”
Zanno adds that discovering the eggs, tucked in the side of a 2,000-foot, sheer cliff-face her team dubbed the “Cliffs of Insanity” (a name that needs no explanation to fans of “The Princess Bride”), was just the beginning. After preparing the egg clutch for removal, the resulting plaster-encased nest was well beyond the team’s capacity to carry out on foot, and no vehicle could reach the cliff. That left only one solution — helicopter salvage. After airlifting the clutch from the cliff, the eggs were laid carefully into the bed of a truck-drawn trailer for transportation back to North Carolina.
Now, safely back at the Museum, chief fossil preparator Aaron Giterman has begun to slowly release the fossil eggs from the surrounding rock so they can be studied. Visitors to the Museum can watch the preparation of eggs behind the glass walls of the Paleontology Research Lab beginning on March 29, 2018.
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