Jan. 2—Christi M. was walking along the river bottoms of District 10 when she noticed a peculiar looking object. As a caretaker for a nearby 60-acre property, exploration had become part of her daily routine, but something about this item seemed out of the ordinary.

As she examined the item a little more closely she became shocked, excitement building inside her.

“I’ve found quite a few things out on the property, but never in a million years did I expect this,” exclaimed Christi M.

Over by the adjacent levees, an archaeologist just so happened to be inspecting the grounds and Chrisit M. decided to approach him.

“His job is to help inspect construction areas for Native artifacts,” explained Christi M. “I showed him what I found and he thought it could actually be a fossilized dinosaur egg.”

The item in question was roughly the same size and shape as a chicken egg and appeared to have been cracked open. The classic jagged edge of a shell was visible with a hardened inner “yolk” inside.

Unsure of what to do with this discovery, Christi M. carefully wrapped the object and took it home for further investigation. About a month later she decided to broach the subject with her local newspaper.

“It really looks like a fossilized egg,” said Chrisit M. “But I’m not really sure how to verify that.”

Staff at the Appeal were equally intrigued and soon professionals had been contacted at nearly every local university.

While Christi M.’s rock may not have been confirmed as a dinosaur egg, the following responses were fascinating in their own right. Here is what a handful of geological experts had to say about her special find:

Korey Champe, assistant professor of earth science at Yuba College

“This looks fairly compelling, but in my experience dinosaur eggs are extremely rare. Like it might as well be a piece of gold. This is copied from the Utah Museum of Natural History:

‘Fossils of dinosaur eggs are very rare. Aside from requiring rapid and delicate burial, dinosaurs only spent a few months, at most, inside their eggs. If a nest’s eggs were not eaten or otherwise destroyed, the baby dinosaurs themselves would break out of them upon hatching.’

It looks a bit like a mud concretion to me. But it’s hard to tell without holding it. … That being said, there were dinosaurs in California, so it’s not impossible.”

Tracy Thomson, lecturer and research assistant at the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D in geology and a special focus in vertebrate paleontology and ichnology

“The rocks and sediments in that area are not of the right type or age for dinosaur fossils. The sediments in District 10 of Yuba County are all Quaternary-aged recent valley fill, no more than a few million years old, and any rocks or fossils there that would be dinosaur age (more than 65 million years old) would have had to have been transported by the river from older rocks elsewhere and deposited in District 10. Such transport would likely destroy any fossil material. … This has the look of an incompletely formed geode to me. These form when minerals precipitate in voids within sediments. Usually a roundish rind forms with colored mineral crystals in the center but if the rind breaks or is incompletely formed the center can fill with more sediment instead of mineral crystals. A mineralogist would have a better guess and explanation than I could provide.”

Ryosuke Motani, Ph.D. professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Davis

“Dinosaur eggs usually have thin eggshells of 1 to 2.5 mm in thickness. There is a collection of exceptionally thick eggshell fragments with an average thickness of 3.48 mm known from Spain but these eggs, if complete, would be much larger than your specimen. Dinosaurs use a single layer of crystals of uniform shapes to form the eggshell, and these crystals look like pillars in thick eggshells, with diameters of less than 1 mm (0.59 mm average in those thick Spanish shells). It seems to me that these features are not evident in this specimen, although photographs may betray us. If you see a layer formed by a bundle of uniform pillars paving the rock surface all along the broken margin, then it may be worth taking a closer look. … That said, this is a wonderful rock specimen that looks like an egg that hatched, at least superficially. What are the chances of finding something like that! It is a keeper.”