Productinformation
Extremely rare natural history item: Elephant bird egg.
Species: Aepyornis maximus
Origin: Southern Madagascar
These eggs are almost impossible to find nowadays. They are the largest eggs ever laid by a bird. The egg is 160 times larger than a chicken egg. Probably only about 40 truly intact eggs have ever been found.
In 2014, a centuries-old elephant bird egg was auctioned at Christie's in London for £122,500 (almost one and a half tonnes in euros!).
The egg was found in southern Madagascar in 2018. Its age is estimated at 1,500 years, as determined by the soil layer in which it was found.
The name elephant bird first appears in Marco Polo's book Rukh, which is why the name is still used today. Another sighting of the elephant bird comes from Étienne de Flacourt, a French governor of Madagascar in the 1640s and 1650s, who described giant ostriches, which are believed to be the elephant bird. This means that it was not yet extinct at that time.