The research team at the nesting site

Chennai, Oct. 7: Hundreds of fossilised dinosaur eggs recently discovered in a Tamil Nadu village are being plundered by locals as state and central authorities squabble over who should protect the rare find.

Villagers in Ariyalur district’s Senthurai, the site of the nest, and others from nearby areas have been seen digging up the spot and walking home with the eggs.

“Most of them claim they want to keep the eggs as a memento, while a few hope they (the eggs) will fetch fancy prices when their real scientific worth is determined,” said, S. Pushpavanam, a retired schoolteacher in Airyalur town, 300km from Chennai.

M.U. Ramkumar, the head of geology at Periyar University in Coimbatore, who led the team that discovered the nest, is horrified.

“When paleontologists world over are excited about the find, digging up the site will forever contaminate it, rendering it unsuitable for further research,” he said.

His team was planning to send the eggs to geological labs across the world in batches. Now, he doubts if there will be enough left.

The eggs, estimated to be 65 million years old, were found in clusters over a 2sqkm area, suggesting it was a major nesting site for leaf-eating Sauropod dinosaurs, which returned to the spot year after year.

Since the eggs were found unhatched, scientists were trying to find out what made them infertile. “Going by sediments of volcanic ash covering the nest, our first guess is that volcanic activity and the heat generated by it could have killed the eggs and their Jurassic forefathers, too,” Ramkumar said.

Each egg is the size of a football, about 13cm to 23cm in diameter. They were found buried in sandy nests along a riverbed.

Although Ramkumar said he had written to Ariyalur collector T. Abraham to protect the site, the official denied having received any such request.

“If the request comes, we will deploy security around it (the nest). Now that the media has brought it to our notice, we will do it (provide security) on our own. We will also try and retrieve the eggs from the villagers,” Abraham said.

Initially, the state authorities had argued that protecting the site was the job of the Geological Survey of India (GSI). But GSI officials pointed out that in the absence of legal powers to protect a monument or site, unlike the Archaeological Survey of India, they had to depend on state authorities to notify an area as geologically sensitive.

The Gujarat government was quick to provide police protection after such Jurassic nests were discovered. “But there, the scientists had the foresight to inform the authorities first before sharing it (the discovery) with the media. Here, they were in a hurry to get publicity,” said an officer of the state public information department.

But in Madhya Pradesh’s Jabalpur, the site of one of the largest such finds, the dino eggs are still being plundered by locals and tourists.