During the 1930 and Aussie farm boy unearthed a football sized egg that has baffled scientists for years. What’s more, another find of a giant fossilized egg about two hundred kilometers north of Perth, on the Western Australian coast, made news around the world. This second giant egg was found at Christmas 1992 by schoolchildren in sand dunes, about a kilometer inland. It was described as ‘Quite Queer” by the children. Let’s take a closer look…
Researcher’s confirm that the objects are in fact eggs, bird eggs to be more precise. But they say that the eggs are many times bigger than an egg laid by the giant emu, the largest egg the scientists of the Australian continent have ever found. Though the eggs remain a mystery to this day, theories abound. It is most likely that these are eggs from the extinct 'elephant bird', Aepyornis, known to have lived in Madagascar. It was assumed that the eggs had floated thousands of kilometers to their Australian locations. The second finding caused considerable interest because of the surprising suggestion of an egg having survived such a long sea journey.
Most papers at the time did not mention that another such egg had already been found in the 1930s.
This earlier egg was found by a ten–year–old farm boy, Victor Roberts, in sand dunes south of the Scott River (which is about two hundred kilometers south of Perth on the same coastline), about 100 meters from the sea.
At around 28 centimeters (11 inches) long and 22 centimeters (8 inches) wide, with a volume of around eight liters (about two gallons), it was 'much larger than the largest fossil Giant Moa's (an extinct New Zealand bird) egg known'. When he realized how heavy it was, the young finder knocked a hole in it and emptied out the contents, which were like sand. The egg has a very strong shell, about six millimeters (1/4 inch) thick.
The coastal location of this earlier egg, like its successor, is consistent with the idea that it arrived by sea, as is the fact that no elephant bird bones have been properly documented in Australia.
What is exceedingly curious, however, is the report in a 1968 Western Australian newspaper in which the finder of the egg (who had become a respected cattleman and councilor for the Augusta–Margaret River shire) describes how he clearly recalls something else in the sand dunes close to the egg. Victor said, 'There was at least part of a skeleton just a short distance away. I distinctly remember that there was a very large skull with a beak on it.'
By then 46 years old, Mr. Roberts said that he could still locate the approximate site, but that searching for the skeleton of what he said 'for sure' was a huge beaked skull and bones would be a massive task, as the dunes shifted continually under the influence of the wind. He had looked for it again from time to time after a storm, in the remote hope that it would be uncovered again.
Did elephant birds once live in Australia? We may never know for sure. In recounting this information, I am not necessarily disputing the alternative 'floating egg' interpretation (which might give a clue concerning some types of flightless bird migration post-Flood). However, there is further intriguing evidence that elephant birds may have once lived here.
In the article, Victor Roberts is quoted as saying, 'As a young lad growing up in the Scott River area ... I often heard the Aboriginal legends about when the birds were as high as the hills.' Early explorers to Madagascar also heard tales of giant birds, which they thought were myths until fossils of elephant birds were found, which showed not only that such creatures had existed, but that this was in recent human memory.
Fossilization needs special conditions. Creatures can live in an area for years without leaving fossils. For example, there are no known lion fossils in Palestine/Israel but there is well–documented evidence that they once lived there.
The hypothesis that elephant birds were living during the time of aboriginal occupation of the Western Australian coast explains three items of evidence: The regional stories themselves, the two eggs found (without having to postulate that they each made the same vast ocean journey), and the eyewitness report of a large–beaked skeleton next to one of these eggs. However, accepting all this would mean rejecting some popular, evolution–based ideas, such as the huge ages usually assigned to these eggs—up to a million years. Just more proof that we live in a weird but wonderful world.
I’m Average Joe
No comments:
Post a Comment