page_title: Timeline of egg fossil research
section_title: 19th-century paleontology
hierarchical_section_title: Timeline of egg fossil research / 19th-century paleontology
caption_attribution_description: A Hypselosaurus egg (Dinosaurland, Lyme Regis).
context_page_description: This timeline of egg fossils research is a chronologically ordered list of important discoveries, controversies of interpretation, taxonomic revisions, and cultural portrayals of egg fossils. Humans have encountered egg fossils for thousands of years. In Stone Age Mongolia, local peoples fashioned fossil dinosaur eggshell into jewelry. In the Americas, fossil eggs may have inspired Navajo creation myths about the human theft of a primordial water monster's egg. Nevertheless, the scientific study of fossil eggs began much later. As reptiles, dinosaurs were presumed to have laid eggs from the 1820s on, when their first scientifically documented remains were being described in England. In 1859, the first scientifically documented dinosaur egg fossils were discovered in southern France by a Catholic priest and amateur naturalist named Father Jean-Jacques Poech, however he thought they were laid by giant birds.
  The first scientifically recognized dinosaur egg fossils were discovered serendipitously in 1923 by an American Museum of Natural History crew while looking for evidence of early humans in Mongolia.
context_section_description: 1859
  The first scientifically documented dinosaur egg fossils were discovered in southern France by a Catholic priest and amateur naturalist named Father Jean-Jacques Pouech. These fossils were large chunks of eggshell that date back to the Late Cretaceous. Poech mistook them for the shell of a giant bird's eggs.
  1869
  French geologist Philippe Matheron made a fossil discovery in the same general region as Poech. Matheron discovered the fossil bones of an animal he named Hypselosaurus. Matheron thought Hypselosaurus to be a crocodile-like animal, but it is now recognized as a long-necked herbivorous sauropod dinosaur. Eggshell fossils were found associated with the remains. Matheron presented the shell fossils to the director of comparative anatomy at Paris' Natural History Museum, Paul Gervais. Gervais examined thin sections of the shell fossils and compared them with similar thin sections of eggs laid by modern birds and reptiles. He found them to be most similar to turtle eggs, but recognized that since dinosaur eggs had not yet been described scientifically, he could not rule out that possibility.
caption: Hypselosaurus egg.
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