René finds millions of years old scale of DINO-Ei: ‘Suddenly world news’

The museum scientists were three years ago for sieve work in Wyoming. On the east side of the Rocky Mountains, archaeological discoveries are made more often, but René never found them as special as this one.

“The piece was as small as my pinknail. I think most of the researchers had thrown the piece away,” he laughs. Dinosaurusfan When he is, the director did recognize the piece.

“As a little boy, I once found a dinosauri with my parents in France. I recognized the structure. The piece was smooth from the inside, the outside was lumpy and the cross -section consisted of lime crystal,” he says full of passion.

Yet the director had no idea that it was from a Tyrannosaurus Rex, one of the last dinos species that lived in North America up to 66 million years ago. To find out which dinosus the egg was, the paleontologists of the museum have done years of research.

The honor of student Tom van der Linden to do the complex research. The student already discovered a new dinosche in 2022, which purchased the Oertijdmuseum a few years earlier.

For this eggshell, Tom has compared dozens of earlier studies and analyzes with the mysterious piece. The piece had to be broken and sharpened in four parts. The grinding plates could then be compared with eggshells that were previously found in China and Mongolia.

The find looked like an eggshell of a Tarbosaurus, the ancestor of the T-Rex. “But because the Tarbosaurus lived around East Asia, it could only be an eggshell of the Tyrannosaurus,” says René.

When the director heard that, he couldn’t do his happiness. “I started at the age of eleventh and am now 66 years old, but I never dared to dream. The piece turned out to be a hit.”

Because even though it is a piece of five millimeters, it is groundbreaking for research into the T-Rex. “For example, it was often thought to lay tyrannosaurs weak eggs because the eggs could not acidify. That now appears,” says the director.

Thanks to the research by Tom and his team, we now also know that the egg is about 76 million years old, was oval and had a size of 10 to 12 centimeters by 8 to 10 centimeters.

With the discovery, the museum can count on a lot of international interest. “The study was published in an international science magazine, we have been to Museums in America and we are busy coming to the well -known Science Magazine National Geographic. For example, a small museum from Boxtel is world news in one fell swoop,” he laughs.

The researchers hope that it will not stop with this special discovery. They continue to do research in the US state. “We have just returned to nine weeks of research. We are still looking for nesting places from the T-Rex, because the piece is so well preserved, angular and not rolled down that there should be more pieces in the neighborhood,” says the director expectantly.