The First Colored Eggs Appeared Long Before Easter
This Easter, we’ve hidden a dozen colorful, egg-centric stories across Reason.com. Hop around the site to find them—or click here to see them all in one basket.
The tradition of coloring eggs to celebrate Easter can be traced to the 13th-century Britain, and perhaps even earlier, to early Christian Europe and Mesopotamia. But these were not the first colored eggs. Researchers have recently determined that they likely appeared about 150 million years ago.
The story of that discovery begins just over 100 years ago, when swashbuckling fossil hunter Roy Chapman Andrews first dug up a clutch of dinosaur eggs in intact nests in Mongolia. (Although hailed as the first discovery, two French naturalists in the mid-19th century had actually found dinosaur eggshells earlier, but mistakenly attributed them to giant birds at the time.)
Andrews’ privately funded expeditions on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History in New York were financed with help from prominent businessmen, including John Pierpont Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. In 1923, Andrews uncovered an oviraptor nest containing 15 eggs in Mongolia’s Djadochta Formation. Given the early stage of paleontology, Andrews and his contemporaries could not know what color (if any) the eggs may have sported before becoming fossilized.
A team of paleontologists associated with the A
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