More Than 100 Eggs of Huge Sauropod Dinosaurs Discovered In India

Recently, three Indian amateur fossil hunters have dug more than 100 fossilized eggs of dinosaurs in a remote area in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

The ancient eggs are the result of an 18-hour hunt.

The fossil hunters also discovered the footprints of the dinosaurs which laid the eggs, which allow the researchers to trace the now ancient heavy animals. "They are the typical, spherical eggs that researchers interpret as having been laid by sauropod dinosaurs," said paleontologist Hans-Dieter Sues, an associate director for research and collections at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and a former member of the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration.

Sauropods are one of the most well known dinosaurs: they are vegetarians characterized by their long necks and tails and the largest creatures that have ever roamed the Earth: some were more than 30 m (100 feet) long and weighed more than 1000 tonnes.

Sauropods lived from Jurassic (the middle of the Dinosaur era) till the beginning of the Cretaceous (the last Dinosaur era), disappearing before the great dinosaurs' extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.

One of the discoverers, Vishal Verma, said the eggs were discovered in clusters of six to eight. "The eggs were laid during the Cretaceous period, roughly 146 to 66 million years ago, by dinosaurs between 40 and 90 feet (12 and 27 meters) long", said Verma.

The researchers believe that the dinosaurs used to come from miles away to make their nests in the sandy shores of a long-gone waterway. "These animals used to come from far away areas to lay eggs on the sandy banks of the rivers in this area, identified scientifically as Lameta bed," Verma said.

All the fossilized eggs were in a sole nesting site in Kukshi-Bagh area, some 95 miles (150 km) southwest of Indore, a key city of Madhya Pradesh. "Dinosaur eggs have been found at hundreds of sites worldwide and there are thousands of such eggs from the Late Cretaceous in central India", said Sues.

The richest Indian dinosaur site is located in the "Deccan Traps" near Jabalpur, a town which is also in Madhya Pradesh. "It is neither unusual nor unexpected" but "this is a nice find", says Sues.