An Egg that Won’t Hatch - Creation Moments

Job 30:29

“I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.”

We do not have many artifacts in the Mount St Helens Creation Center, as we consider ourselves more of a visitors’ center than a museum. But, over the years, we have acquired one or two interesting pieces. One of them is a fossilized egg, and I have been reliably informed that it is the egg of a hadrosaurus.

The hadrosaurus was one of the earliest and most famous fossil discoveries of the 19^th Century. Having seen some large bones, dug up by someone twenty years previously, the discoverer dug up a nearly complete skeleton in 1858, in a woodland site in New Jersey. The dinosaur was subsequently named Hadrosaurus foulkii, for its discoverer. It was thought to be a dinosaur, similar to iguanadon.

It was ten years before the skeleton was assembled for display. The sculptor who assembled the skeleton was the British naturalist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Foulke had contacted the paleontologist Joseph Leidy, who decided that the dinosaur must have walked on two legs, which is interesting, because Hawkins had previously built a model iguanadon at the Crystal Palace dinosaur park in London, England, showing the iguanadon on all fours, like a lizard.

Today, the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences houses the dinosaur, and many other fossil hadrosaurs have been discovered, making it, and its eggs, some of the most popular fossils around. Hadrosaurs were beautiful creatures, made by God on Day Six of creation week, along with the other land animals.

Prayer: All Your creations are magnificent, Lord. We praise You when we see Your handiwork. Amen.

Author: Paul F. Taylor

Ref: Encyclopaedia Britannica, < https://www.britannica.com/animal/dinosaur/Classification#ref294489 >, accessed 12/22/2018. Image: Author’s own photograph.