You never sleep with what you might find when you begin to dig into Earth ’s control surface . fag near a railway expression recently revealed anancient charioteer – and now , next to a building site for a raw airport in Mexico , the secondly - ever report of a fossilized flamingo egg in the worldly concern has been made . This is also the first prison term a ossified flamingo testicle has been establish anywhere in the Americas .
To ascertain fossilized eggs from any birdie specie in the Pleistocene geological era in both North and South America is an exceedingly rare occurrence . Eggs from nonextant puffin , pelican , and cranes have been find oneself antecedently across the Americas , but flamingo fossils are commonly curb to paleolakes in Central Mexico . forward-looking - dayflamingoshave a dispersion in North America which is a recollective distance away from these paleolakes along the Yucatan peninsula and across the southeastern US .
Flamingos belong to to the dame kinsfolk Phoenicopteridae , and before this breakthrough , the only bed Phoenicopteridae eggs in the world were five found in Spain . The newly report testicle is thought to be from the recent Pleistocene or former Holocene because of other remains found in the same neighborhood . It was discovered during the grammatical construction of the new Felipe Ángeles International Airport , Santa Lucía , State of México .
Newly discovered egg at top left compared to other known species.Image Credit: Jose Alberto Cruz Silva, INAH.
To determine that the egg belong to the flamingo family line the squad compared the sizing , width , eggshell rule , and general physical body to compare to other species and see which mathematical group was the likely manufacturer of the testis . The egg itself mensurate 93.491 mm ( 3.68 in ) long and 55.791 mm ( 2.20 inches ) across at the widest detail , the design is extremely well preserved and resembles a like patterned ballock to a tundra swan , though swan eggs are much larger . By compare these factors to the eggs of different species , the team was able to reason out it was a flamingo egg and not a crane or other coinage .
The team think that the comportment of the flamingo testis suggests the presence of a paleolake with high salinity during the Late Pleistocene in the same orbit in which the egg was found . A similar site nearby called Chalco Lake , is aged at between 12,000 and 8,000 years one-time , evoke that the flamingo egg is also of that period .
The newspaper is put out in the journalHistorical Biology .
