NC museum unveils football-size eggs of 15-foot-tall chicken-like dinosaur

RALEIGH, N.C. —
Visitors to a North Carolina museum now have the chance to see the football-size eggs of a feathered dinosaur that scientists say are about 97 million years old.

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh is displaying two eggs found in Utah from a dinosaur that one expert calls "a 15-foot-tall chicken."

The eggs, discovered last October by museum paleontologist Lindsay Zanno and her team, look like small footballs.

The eggs were tucked in the face of a sheer 2,000-foot cliff.

On the museum website, Zanno said: “It was a moment when 20 years of hard-earned determination, patience, luck and that little voice inside my head led to one of the most important fossil discoveries of my life.”

After preparing the eggs for removal, the resulting 1,400-pound plaster-encased clutch was well beyond the team’s capacity to carry out on foot, so a helicopter was used to airlift the clutch of eggs from the cliff side to a tractor-trailer for the trip to North Carolina.

The oviraptorosaur eggs are the first ever found in North America. Most other examples have been found in China and Mongolia.

Oviraptorosaurs had feathers, beaks and parrot-shaped heads and walked on two legs. They weighed about 500 pounds.

Museum visitors can watch the continuing study of the eggs as they are released from the 1,400-pound rock that encases them. Two eggs are already on displace in the museum's glass-walled laboratory.