Tonight, I'm going to talk about an article released a few days ago about a mysterious egg.
After nearly a decade of mystery, scientists have confirmed that an unusual fossil from Antarctica is actually a massive egg — and it may have belonged to a real-life Loch Ness Monster.
The fossilized, soft-shelled egg is the biggest discovery of its kind, and the first-ever egg to turn up on the Earth's southernmost continent. The 66-million-year-old egg likely came from a giant, ancient reptile, reports a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Since its 2011 discovery, the egg fossil had puzzled researchers, who have likened it to a deflated football. The peculiar oval, which is about 11 inches long and 7 inches wide, earned a nickname among scientists that matched its mystery: "The Thing."
In the new findings, researchers used microscopic analysis to confirm that the fossil is indeed an ancient egg. Researchers analyzed the body size of 260 living reptiles, compared with their egg sizes, to estimate that the animal that laid the egg would have been more than 20 feet long.
Unlike hard dinosaur eggs, The Thing is soft-shelled, like a turtle's egg. That suggests the egg belonged instead to a massive aquatic reptile — like the mosasaurus, an aquatic reptilian predator that lived in the Late Cretaceous.
"It is from an animal the size of a large dinosaur, but it is completely unlike a dinosaur egg," lead author Lucas Legendre, a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Texas at Austin, says. "It is most similar to the eggs of lizards and snakes, but it is from a truly giant relative of these animals."
The researchers say that the egg is similar to modern snake and lizard eggs, which are sometimes transparent and hatch moments after they're laid.
Who laid the egg? — Without a skeleton inside, paleontologists don't have any way of confirming what massive prehistoric creature laid The Thing.
But if it is indeed a mosasaurs' egg, the new finding would overturn what scientists have previously thought — that these ancient creatures didn't lay eggs. Since there are no living aquatic reptiles the size of a mosasaurus, the egg seems to be in a class of its own.
There are some encouraging clues: Researchers know that mosasaurs lived in Antarctica and the Antarctica rock formation where the egg was found also contained fossils from mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. Those fossilized remains have fascinated researchers and the public for centuries — in fact, some theories suggest that the pair directly influenced Loch Ness Monster lore.
In a 2019 study, researchers found that a type of "dino-mania" followed the discovery of creatures like mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. Essentially, people became collectively taken with the sea monsters, and they began to appear before people's very eyes. Those study authors partially proved a theory laid out by American science fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp: "After Mesozoic reptiles became well-known, reports of sea serpents, which until then had tended towards the serpentine, began to describe the monster as more and more resembling a Mesozoic reptile than like a plesiosaur or mosasaur."
It stands to reason that you can't fear what you don't know — and after you've been exposed to a monstrous, 20-foot-long aquatic reptile predator, there's really no looking back.
