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Good news for the Oertijdmuseum in Boxtel. Today, the museum digitized 33 dinosaur eggs at the Jeroen Bosch Hospital in Den Bosch. The museum is looking for dinosaur embryos in the eggs. Soon, a scan revealed something. Maarten de Rijke, curator of the museum, assumes that it is an embryo. He calls it “world news” because there aren’t even ten on this earth.
The museum wants to use the embryos to study how a dinosaur develops inside the egg. The fossil egg contains petrified pieces and this would be an indication of an embryo. This is apparent from the CT scan performed at Bossche Hospital. The egg will go to Switzerland, where even better equipment is available for further research.
Something was found in two of the other 32 eggs, but curator De Rijke says it’s not as clear as with the first egg.
“The egg is about seventy million years old.”
The investigation at the Jeroen Bosch hospital began at the end of the afternoon. This time, not a patient with a broken bone under the scanner, but a dinosaur egg. “The egg is around seventy million years old,” De Rijke said. Scanning dinosaur eggs in a regular hospital was a lot of work beforehand, according to the curator. “We spent a year organizing the paperwork for this.”
Today was the day. What did De Rijke really want to know with the scanner? “We want to demonstrate that eggs contain embryos or embryo bones. This will allow us to have a better picture of the development of the dinosaur in the egg. Very little is known about this yet.”
The chance of an embryo being found was very low before. De Rijke: “But because we have a total of 182 eggs in the museum, also of different species, there was a reasonable chance.”
“The tension is intense in the museum.”
Very few fossil embryos have been found anywhere in the world. “If we found something now, it would be unique and cause a stir.” De Rijke is looking for “abnormalities” on scans inside the egg. “It could be color differences, for example. If that’s the case, we’ll go to Switzerland. They have an even finer particle accelerator there and we can see something on a deeper level.”
The 182 dinosaur eggs in the museum come from France, Spain and Mongolia. “The tension is intense in the museum. Everyone is curious: do we have eggs with or without an embryo. I hope for an egg with an embryo. I can only dream of it.”
