Cheaper by the dozen
Q: What animal holds the record for laying the heaviest egg?
A: The world's largest living bird--the ostrich--lays the heaviest egg and she lays six to eight of them while she's at it. Each is
about six inches long and weighs up to 2½ pounds. That's 24 chicken eggs in volume.
Left:
[Michael "Ty" Naus, Wyoming Dinosaur Center] Comparing eggs.
The shell is 0.06 of an inch thick (the diameter of a pinhead) but can support the weight of an adult human. The largest ostrich
egg on record was laid in 1988 on a collective farm in Israel. It weighted 5 lb. 2 oz.
The extinct giant Elephant Bird (Aephornis maximus) of Madagascar laid eggs as big in volume as seven ostrich eggs and
bigger than any dinosaur egg. They were the largest single-cells that ever existed on Earth. By the way, the half-ton Elephant
Bird became extinct fairly recently: about 1700.
The figure shows eggs of various modern reptiles and birds: Clockwise from the upper-left: an ostrich egg, crocodile eggs, one
set of tortoise eggs, another set of tortoise eggs, and an Elephant Bird egg. All based on the same scale: a 6-inch long ostrich
egg.
(Answered by April Holladay, science correspondent, June 27, 2001)
Further Surfing:
Guinness book of records, 2000, birds
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