Elephant bird egg ONE HUNDRED times bigger than a hen’s egg goes on sale… and it’s yours

Elephant bird egg ONE HUNDRED times bigger than a hen’s egg goes on sale… and it’s yours

Mangalore Today News Network

It’s an egg that would make the mother of all omelettes, being more than 100 times the size of a chicken egg.

The giant partly-fossilised egg of an elephant bird is being put up for auction at Christie’s and is 30cm high and 21cm in diameter.

The elephant bird, which resembled an 11-foot-tall ostrich, is thought to have been hunted to extinction in Madagascar between the 14th and 17th centuries.

Cracking size: James Hyslop, scientific specialist at Christie’s auction house, displays a sub-fossilised elephant bird egg measuring over 100 times the average size of a chicken egg

Examples of whole eggs are extremely rare and it is likely to fetch up to £30,000.

More than 260 lots will go under the hammer in the Travel, Science and History sale at Christies, including curiosities of natural history, globes, scientific instruments, rare books and maps, alongside paintings and works of art from the ages of exploration.

 

Occasionally subfossilised elephant bird eggs are found intact and the National Geographic Society in Washington holds a specimen of an Aepyornis egg which was given to Luis Marden in 1967.

The specimen is intact and contains the skeleton of the unborn bird.

n Denver, the Museum of Nature and Science holds two intact eggs, one of which is currently on display. Another giant Aepyornis egg is on show at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, while a cast of the egg is preserved at the Grant Museum of Zoology at London University.

David Attenborough owns an almost complete eggshell, dating from 6-700 CE, which he pieced together from fragments that were given to him while making his 1961 BBC series Zoo Quest to Madagascar.

In March 2011, the BBC aired the 60-minute documentary Attenborough and the Giant Egg, presented by Attenborough, about his personal scientific quest to discover the secrets of the elephant bird and its egg.

There is also an intact specimen of an elephant bird’s egg on display at the Delaware Museum of Natural History as well as another in London’s Natural History Museum, London.

The Melbourne Museum in Australia has two elephant bird eggs. The first was acquired for £100 by Professor Frederick McCoy in June 1862, and is an intact example.

 

In 1950 it was subjected to radiological examination, although disappointingly it revealed no traces of embryonic material.

It is widely believed that the extinction of Aepyornis was a result of human activity. The birds were initially widespread, occurring from the northern to the southern tip of Madagascar.

One theory states that humans hunted the elephant birds to extinction in a very short time for such a large landmass (the blitzkrieg hypothesis). There is indeed evidence that they were hunted and their preferred habitats destroyed.

Their eggs may have been particularly vulnerable. A recent archaeological study found remains of eggshells among the remains of human fires, suggesting that the eggs regularly provided meals for entire families.

Courtesy: Dailmail London