Confiscated dinosaur eggs will continue their travel to Moscow

A clutch of dinosaur eggs which was confiscated on a train heading from Beijing to Moscow in early February, are likely to be sent to Moscow for expert examination. Suspicious objects were located in the ceiling space in a restroom in one of the cars of the train, customs officials are quoted by Interfax as saying. The border guards and the customs officials proved unable to determine what exactly the 15 objects were. Three of them were 13 cm long and 5 cm wide and the rest resembled eggshells. The find was sent to one of the institutes with the Buryat research centre of the Siberian division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where the objects were established to be dinosaur eggs estimated as 150-170 million years old. However, the scientists were unable to determine what species of dinosaur had laid the eggs, as such expert examination can be carried out only in Moscow research institutes. The paleontological treasures are most likely to have been found in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, as they are similar to others found in Mongolia in the 1970s, experts say. The eggs are valued at about $1 million.