Phone tower digging uncovers dinosaur egg

Rakesh Patel

Feb 24, 2004 | AHMADABAD, India (AP) -- Laborers digging up land to erect a telephone tower found what they thought was a large round stone in western India this week. But local officials said it as a 65 million-year-old fossilized dinosaur egg and villagers have been crowding in from miles around to peer at the find.

The egg was dug up Sunday in Balasinore, 100 kilometers (60 miles) southwest of Ahmadabad, commercial hub of Gujarat state.

Last August, in Raioli, a sleepy village 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Balasinore, paleontologists were startled by the announcement that bones discovered there were from a new dinosaur species, the Rajasaurus narmadensis. It was named for the nearby Narmada River where the bones were found by scientists from the University of Chicago, who assembled its skull after years of painstaking work funded by National Geographic, and discovered it was a new species.

The discovery of the grayish, four-kilogram (nine-pound) egg has everyone in the district excited and huge crowds are thronging the office of the state telephone company to see it.

"We have stopped work at the site and we will have to see if there are more such finds," said D. Thara, the local official for Kheda district.

He said Tuesday he had written to tell the Archaeological Survey of India that the egg appears similar to those found near the Rajasaurus.

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