Real life Jurassic Park? Perfectly preserved dinosaur eggs discovered in China
Builders have made a huge discovery in China after finding perfectly preserved dinosaur eggs.
Construction workers in the Jiangxi Province were building a school on Christmas Day when they stumbled across the perfectly preserved eggs, express.co.uk reported.
Experts were immediately called in to analyze the fossils who dated them back to be 130 million years old.
This would mean they date back to the Cretaceous period, which lasted from 145 million years ago to 66 million years ago, when the tyrannosaurus rex roamed the Earth.
The workers said they spotted a cluster of ‘oval-shaped stones’ in the ground when they were using explosives to break up the dirt.
It is believed there are between 20 and 30 of the eggs encased in rock and dirt, and now scientists are working to extract them while preserving their state.
The discovery comes just weeks after scientists found a piece of amber fossil with a tick inside which contains the blood of dinosaurs.
The insect is actually a newly discovered species of tick, which has been called Deinocroton draculi or ‘Dracula’s terrible tick’, and would have fed on the blood of dinosaurs 100 million years ago.
The tick-encased-amber was discovered on the inside of a tree, and also enclosed was a small feather — which began to evolve on dinosaurs before they eventually evolved into modern day birds.
The University of Oxford called this the first direct fossil evidence of ticks parasitizing dinosaurs.
Dr. Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, a paleobiologist at Oxford University Museum of Natural History and one of the authors of the study describing the parasites, said: “The fossil record tells us that feathers like the one we have studied were already present on a wide range of theropod dinosaurs.
“Although we can’t be sure what kind of dinosaur the tick was feeding on, the mid-cretaceous age of the Burmese amber confirms that the feather certainly did not belong to a modern bird.”