Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Of course something like this would happen with a new Jurassic Park movie on the horizon: Members of a construction crew working on a road in China’s Guangdong Province earlier this month discovered dozens of fossilized dinosaur eggs, according to media reports.
As the Huffington Post reported, the workers uncovered a total of 43 fossilized eggs while working on a road in the city of Heyuan in the southern part of the country. Nineteen of the eggs were described as fully intact, and the largest was more than seven inches in diameter.
It is currently not known what species the eggs belong to, but they have been sent to a museum in the city for analysis, according to ABC News. While this is the first time dinosaur eggs have been found in the city center, they are far for the first fossils found in the region.
“Hometown of the Dinosaur in China”
As The Verge explains, the local dinosaur museum in Heyuan was presented with a Guinness World Record in 2004 for having the largest collection of fossilized dinosaur eggs in the world. At the time, they had 10,008, and nearly 17,000 have been found there since 1996.
In April 2005, the city was officially declared “Hometown of the Dinosaur in China” during an international paleontology event, according to local media reports. Heyuan was honored by the China Geological Survey’s Stratum and Paleontology Center, as well as 40 paleontologists from the US, France, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Canada and Belgium.
At the time, Zhao Zikui from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Palaeoanthropology said that dinosaur egg fossils recovered in China accounted for one-third the total amount found worldwide, and experts credit the red sandstone formations found in the city for helping to keep the fossilized eggs well preserved.
In addition to the thousands of fossilized eggs, at least eight preserved dinosaur skeletons and 168 dinosaur footprints have also been discovered in the region. The previously unearthed fossils were from the late Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, and seven belonged to the oviraptor family.
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