Dinosaur eggs discovered in Chechnya

Participants of a geographic expedition in Russia’s North Caucasus Chechen Republic have uncovered a batch of alleged dinosaur egg fossils, the Vesti Respubliki online daily said on Friday. “We were exploring the site [a pristine area in Chechnya’s Sharoyski District], when one of us stumbled upon regular-shaped spheres lying on the nearby rocks. Proceeding from their form, we supposed that these are egg fossils,” Lifenews online tabloid quoted expedition member Said-Emin Dzhabrailov, who heads Chechen State University’s Landscape Explorations Laboratory, as saying. “With 90-percent certainty we say that we found dinosaur eggs. We are presently holding a series of tests and will soon make a final conclusion,” Dzhabrailov continued. He said there were some forty egg fossils with diameters varying between 24 and 100 centimeters in the batch. “The cross-section view [of one of the eggs] shows that its shell, yolk and albumen are quite well-circumscribed. We took several samples to check out the fossils’ physical and chemical composition,” Dzhabrailov said. Scientists believe the eggs were laid by an herbivorous dinosaur that lived some 60 million years ago. Chechen geologists want to hold a roundtable dedicated to their one-off discovery and invite Russian paleontologists. This is the first ever such finding in Chechnya.