Cache of 43 Dinosaur Eggs Uncovered in China

On Sunday, workers at a construction site in the Chinese city of Heyuan—in which nearly 17,000 dinosaur eggs have been discovered in the past 20 years—made a remarkable discovery: At the city’s center, a road repair crew unearthed 43 dinosaur egg fossils, 19 of which were completely intact.

While researchers don’t yet know what species are hiding in the eggs, most of the local specimens in the city's museum came from oviraptor and duck-billed dinosaurs (a.k.a. hadrosaurids). Those eggs are 65 to 89 million years old. The recently-discovered eggs were uncovered in the same red sandstone rock strata as many of the previous finds in Heyuan.

The largest of the eggs is more than 7 inches in diameter, and with the discovery, the city’s collection of dinosaur eggs will grow from 10,008 to 10,051 to go with its 11 fossilized skeletons and nearly 200 footprint fossils. Not a bad bit of buried treasure.