When the issue of the largest egg ever found on Earth is discussed, there is a competition between representatives of reptiles and birds. The elephant bird has a chance to lead with its giant egg, which makes the modern ostrich appear only average in size. However, the “Mysterious Object” that scientists found in Antarctica ranks second and belongs to a completely different category of creatures.

In Antarctica, researchers found a fossil egg belonging to an ancient marine reptile the size of an American football and approximately 66 million years old. This find, representing a soft-shelled egg, was the first of its kind on this continent. It is thought to belong to a mosasaur.

“This sample comes from a dinosaur-sized creature, but the egg doesn’t look dinosaur-like at all,” commented the study’s lead author, Lucas Legendre, a graduate student at the School of Geological Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. “It resembles the eggs of modern lizards and snakes, although it belongs to a truly large representative of these creatures.”

It had previously been assumed that giant marine reptiles from the Cretaceous period gave birth to live offspring, but this surprising finding contradicts this hypothesis. Scientists named this stone fossil, whose dimensions are approximately 28 x 18 centimeters, “Mysterious Object”.

The discovery of the soft-shelled egg, which “attracts attention with its flat and wrinkled shape”, became one of the largest known eggs after the elephant bird egg. Its structure is similar to the eggs of most extant lizards and snakes; This suggests that the creature that deposited it may have laid eggs that continued to develop inside the body until they hatched.

On the other hand, giant flightless elephant birds that once lived in Madagascar could weigh up to 500 kilograms and reach a height of 3 meters. Its enormous size suggested that one egg could feed an entire family.

Unlike the soft egg of the marine reptile, the elephant bird’s egg had a hard shell. With a shell length of 33 centimeters and a content volume of up to 8.5 liters, they are among the largest eggs ever found on Earth.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, one elephant bird egg is equivalent to seven ostrich eggs, 183 chicken eggs and even more than 12,000 hummingbird eggs, making it the largest single cell to ever exist on the planet.

Both species of egg-laying giants have long been extinct, and today the title of largest egg belongs to the ostrich egg. The current avian egg laying record is held by a Swedish ostrich that laid 2,589 kilograms of eggs, according to Discover Wildlife. Source