Ostrich egg fossils displayed in Chinese museum

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After spending 50 years in an underground warehouse, three fossilized ostrich eggs are on display at the Cizhou Kiln Museum in Cixian County in north China's Hebei Province.

The preserved fossils were found by farmers in the 1960s and they immediately took the objects to the county's cultural center.

Experts confirmed they were fossilized ostrich eggs that dated back more than 150,000 years, said Zhao Xuefeng, curator of Cizhou Kiln Museum.

Cixian County, which was previously called Cizhou, has a history of more than a thousand years of porcelain production.

Three ostrich egg fossils seen at a museum in Cixian County, Hebei Province /Xinhua Photo

As there was no place to display them at that time, the ostrich egg fossils remained in the cultural center's warehouse until staff recently examined the stored objects.

The three ostrich egg fossils weigh 552, 492 and 366 grams respectively. The largest is 170 mm long and 140 mm wide.

The area where the ostrich egg fossils were discovered is east of the Taihang Mountains. More than 100,000 years ago, this area is believed to have been plains and wetlands with abundant wildlife including ostriches and deer, Zhao said.

Researchers measuring the size of those egg fossils /Xinhua Photo

The fossils enable the study of the historical distribution and evolution of ostriches, as well as the geological and climate environment of the Pleistocene Epoch - the last Ice Age - which covered the period from 2.6 million years ago to 11,700 years ago, according to Qi Jikang from Hebei Vocational College of Geology.

Ostrich egg fossils have been unearthed in several areas of north China, such as the Inner Mongolia and Ningxia Hui autonomous regions. Ostrich bone fossils were found at Zhoukoudian, in the western suburbs of Beijing, where the skull of the Peking Man was discovered.

The Asiatic ostrich, indigenous to China, has been extinct for a long time.

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Source(s): Xinhua News Agency