I was wondering the same thing. They were about to blow the site sky high with dynamite. The article didn’t mention how they went from thinking they looked like rocks to looking like fossils:
A construction team in China were shocked to discover that what they thought was a collection of "oval-shaped stones" was in fact a nest of perfectly fossilised dinosaur eggs. The group were using explosives to excavate the ground at a site in the Jiangxi province on Christmas Day when they came across the prehistoric find.
Suspecting them to be dinosaur eggs, they stopped construction in the area and contacted the police. The site was sealed off and experts from the county museum were called in to recover the find.
It went from finding what they thought were “oval-shaped stones,” and then it’s suddenly “suspecting them to be dinosaur eggs.”
With how quickly work is expected to get done (in any given field on average) and how careless people who are under that gun of meeting deadlines regardless of any issues cropping up can tend to be I think we are lucky that they were pondered over, at all, in this case. It does make me wonder how many times perfectly preserved fossils have been lost to similar things throughout history, though.
Or from the other angle, imagine how many fossils aren't being discovered because so much of the world is underdeveloped. In the west, many of our discoveries came from people digging things up to build condos, pipelines, malls, etc.
If construction would stop every time you dig out something old there would be no construction at all. But it's not everyday you find perfectly preserved dinosaur eggs.
In the future, maybe there will be a more efficient mechanism to pre-scan a construction site for noteworthy finds. I'm imagining a non-invasive deployment of cyber-worms that go thru soil & nano-drillbots that go rock to survey a site. With sufficiently advanced sensors (which totally exist in my sci-fi future), you could pre-find all the cool stuff. When a construction site has been blessed as 100% uninteresting, you can blast away with your explosives with reckless abandon. You could even buy archaeology insurance to cover you in the event that construction efforts unveil something this survey missed.
Can anyone familiar with construction comment on how construction sites are blessed now, and what hedges are available to construction companies who have to halt construction because someone found dinosaur eggs?
Construction in Italy, especially in Rome, is regularly stopped because they hit something old -- old meaning Roman period. The same is true about other ancient cities such as London and Jerusalem.
I've seen a lot of fossils-in-China articles this year, quite fantastic articles too. Can anyone answer why there are so many being discovered right now and in such remarkable condition?
This find seems legitimate with the construction workers, halting of the project, and minor excavation done in the public eye (of course this is just what is reported in some newspaper). If you are buying fossils in China, they are much more likely to be fake than real. For more expensive pieces the quality can fool a paleontologist in the field.
You'll have to get used to the fact they are getting the credibility they deserve now. Not that they don't lie. That we all do anyway. But that they have the same skill as us.
