OCR Text |
Show Tw iljl Dhi 1$ 311 iO t-'-Tl i?&', SJur. and the large ones by a full- -y-. . 'fsl grown 'hen' Or they may be the eggs '"""X. W-;'-.V V-- ii"l3 of an entirely different species I T X tt3?3kS 7& Jm?8?? "Most interesting of all was the 5ct r n : ; . e i r X ?X HyY: vl - i-J e1 -- ; to fas 10,000,000 h Years Old - !rV; PMoj Cocyrifhbeciby Asia Kafazij-e artd: V fej?f , , s 'T-Jr&r--, ' AmricarxJjeuhxctftatura( History V?3$g& ' s.V V v, 7 By JOHN DICKINSON SHERMAN aaiMaiea OR SALE : One egg ; "WT I $5,000! This is not an 8 I advertisement Just a I. I plain statement of fact, Ifl which gives the lie to the l4s.?$;y time-worn saying that Vrann jmoJ there is nothing new under the sun. For this one egg is the egg of a dinosaur. And that's something new, inasmuch as civilized man never saw one before. And this dinosaur's egg, instead of being graded extra, or fresh first, or ordinary first, or even dirty, Is guaranteed guar-anteed to be at least 10,000,000 years old. Incidentally, it's a hot-storage egg, not cold-storage. Of course dated eggs are nothing new, but here's one with the reverse English on it. And that's new. And this egg, though fossilized and solid rock, Is cherished as a nest egg which again is something new. Moreover, you may have to pay considerably con-siderably more than $5,000 for this one egg. The chap, who wants it most and has the longest purse is the fellow who is most apt to get it. And then he'll have something new. In brief, this fossil dinosaur's egg was brought to America, with others, from Mongolia by the Third Asiatic expedition. It is for sale at an upset price of $3,000, the money to form the nest egg of a fund to finance a fourth expedition, planned in the hope of finding the fossil remains of the very earliest man. The leader of this Third Asiatic expedition ex-pedition was Prof. Itoy Chapman Andrews, An-drews, curator-in-chief of the division of exploration and research of the American Museum of Natural History, who on two previous expeditions to Mongolia had made Important discoveries. discov-eries. It was financed by the museum, the American Asiatic association and Asia Magazine. Its objective was a depression in the Gobi desert of Mongolia, a thousand miles or more from 1'ekin and about thirty miles from the Altai mountains. Here is a hole of a dozen miles or so across in a smooth plain, its edges a vast complex of "bad lands." It was reached hist July by a 4U0-inile journey jour-ney by motorcar across a desert, supplies sup-plies being carried by camels. Professor Profes-sor Andrews writes thus in part In Asia Magazine of the discovery of the eggs : "Our real thrill came on the second day, when George Olson reported at lillin that he was sure he hud found fossil eggs. We joked hirn a good deal, hut nevertheless all of us were curious enough to walk down with him after luncheon. Then our Indifference suddenly sud-denly evaporated; fur we realized that we were looking at the first dinosaur eggs ever seen by a human being. That they must be those of a dinosaur dino-saur we felt certain. True enough, it never was known before that dinosaurs dino-saurs did lay eggs, hut, since most modern reptiles are oviparous, It was considered probable that their ancient ancestors followed this method of reproduction. re-production. Nevertheless, although hundreds of skulls and skeletons of dinosaurs had been discovered In varl- r: 4 4' n ous parts of the world, never had an egg been brought to light. "These eggs could not be those of a bird. No birds are known front the Lower Cretaceous geological horizon in which the eggs were found, and all the Jurassic and Upper Cretaceous birds were much too small to have laid eggs of this size. The elongate shape of the eggs Is distinctly reptilian. reptil-ian. A bird's egg usually is much larger at one end than at the other, because It is deposited in a nest, from which It might roll out unless it revolved re-volved on its point. Reptile eggs, t which often are buried in the earth or sand, usually are elongate and similar simi-lar in shape to the specimens that we found. These eggs were in a great deposit full of dinosaur skeletons and containing, so far as' we could discover, no remains of other animals or of birds. "Three of the eggs lay In a cluster and evidently were in the exact spot where they had been deposited by the dinosaur. The broken shells of several sev-eral others were partially imbedded in the rock. Just under a low sandstone sand-stone shelf, beside which they were lying, we could see the projecting ends of two others. While all the members of the expedition were on their hands and knees about those ten-milllon-year-old eggs, George Olsen began to scrape away the loose rock on the summit of the shelf, and to our amazement he uncovered the skeleton of a small dinosaur, dino-saur, lying eight or ten inches above the eggs. Was It the reptile that had laid the eggs, or was it a predatory dinosaur that bail come to feed upon them? "The preservation Is beautiful. Some of the eggs have been crushed, but the pebbled surface of the shells is as perfect as if the eggs had been laid yesterday instead of ten million years ago. The shells are about one-sixteenth one-sixteenth of an inch thick, and probably prob-ably were hard and not membranous. Fine sand has filtered through breaks, and the interior of all the eggs Is solid sandstone. In the photographs the bits of broken shell partially Imbedded Im-bedded In the rock are plainly to be seen, and it needs no stretch of Imagination Imagi-nation to realize that the objects pictured pic-tured are really eggs. "A few days after the first discovery five eggs were found in a duster. Albert Johnson also obtained groop of nine. Altogether twenty-five eggs were taken out. Some of them, as In the case of the original group, were lying upon the surface of the ground, exposed by the erosion that had worn away the sandstone in which they were imbedded ; others were inclosed In the rock, with only the ends in sight. The egg3 in Johnson's clutch were considerably smaller than the original lot and were unbroken. They may have been laid bv a "pullet dinosaur, dino-saur, and the large ones by a full-grown full-grown 'hen.' Or they may be the eggs of an entirely different species. "Most interesting of all was the 5ct Z&ttw so -?t?o- KZ&iXRapaD that in several of the eggs that had been broken In half we could plainly detect the delicate bone of the embryonic em-bryonic dinosaurs. Never before in the history of science has It been possible pos-sible to study paleoembryology ! Not only did we discover the eggs, but we obtained during our five weeks in this locality a complete development series of Protoceratops. Baby dinosaurs, which probably had been hatched only a few weeks, and others in all stages of growth up to the adults ten feet long, with completely developed frills and incipient horns, were added to our collection. When these are placed Id series, from the eggs to the great trl-ceratops trl-ceratops that has just been mounted In the American Museum of Natural History, it will be an amazing exhibition exhibi-tion of reptilian evolution. No other spot on earth has yielded such a quantity quan-tity of specimens and such unique material ma-terial as this sandy basin in the center of the Gobi desert. . . . From that one locality our collection numbered sixty cases of fossils, weighing five tons. It included seventy skulls, fourteen four-teen skeletons and twenty-five of the first dinosaur eggs ever seen by human eyes." Interesting as Is this find of dinosaur's dino-saur's eggs, the larger aspect of the expedition is more important. It has located in the Chagan Nor region geological geo-logical strata that may contain the remains re-mains of primitive man and there the work of the fourth expedition will he concentrated. The work already done proves that while Europe and America were continents conti-nents at sea-level and practically awash, while the Himalayas had not yet appeared, Mongolia was a fertile, lifted plain, the animal "Garden of Eden." It is hoped to prove that it was also the human "Garden of Eden." The expedition has not yet carefully examined the geological strata that may contain the remains of primitive man. President Henry Fairfield Osborne Os-borne of the American Museum of Nat Ural History believes that the origin of man and of the higher apes was in central Asia. The fossil-beds already partly explored are too old to contain the remains of man. Hut the Chagan Nor beds are of the right period, as they belong to the hitter part ot the Age of Mammals. Professor Osborne is inclined 'o think that man's ancestry will be found to extend far into the past. The age of the Java ape-man has been estimated at riOO.IKK) years, but he thinks it will not be surprising surpris-ing If the first human types are discovered dis-covered in the early Pliocene. In this case a conservative estimate of man's beginning would be well over a million years. Anyway, the same good luck that brought about the discovery - of the dinosaur's eggs may bring back the fossil n mains of the primitive, man whose descendants crossed the. land-bridge to America and also migrated mi-grated to Europe, India and Africa. |