Real-Life Weirdness

[Irish Wolf]

Originally Posted by mukibear

this is personal, not at large, but still.

the other day my father presented my with something he'd found in his yard. it was ovoid and offwhite - he enjoined me to look closer. scratched in the color was a child's cursive 'egg'. apparently, he found some kind of subfossil easter egg - there having been no easter egg hunts at his house for 40yrs. to be honest, it creeps me out - that this exactly the kind of thing a cockatrice would hatch from. do boiled eggs mineralize in certain conditions? it's very solid. i'm keeping it. if i every feel really adventurous, i might put it under a hen. inside a pentagram. just in case.

With candles at the cardinal points, and don't forget the ring of salt... :)

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by mukibear

do boiled eggs mineralize in certain conditions?

Sure it's not manufactured? An egg shape is a popular collector / souvenir item for lots of minerals. (I've got one made from Solnhofen limestone.) And such a thing might well even have been used in an Easter-egg hunt.

There's a sub-field of paleontology called "actuopaleontology" that tries to get insight into past processes by observing them as they happen in the present. I don't think anyone's observed an actual fossil being formed. There have been laboratory recreations or at least simulations of petrified wood, but then, laboratory-perfect conditions designed to produce a result in days for a specific target are unlikely to have been replicated in your father's yard. Could an egg mineralize in certain conditions? Yes. Did it? That's a different question.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by mukibear

... scratched in the color was a child's cursive 'egg'. ...

You obviously have not seen my brother's handrighting. I'm not sure even I could right very legibly on a rock hard egg.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Sure it's not manufactured? An egg shape is a popular collector / souvenir item for lots of minerals. (I've got one made from Solnhofen limestone.) And such a thing might well even have been used in an Easter-egg hunt.
..

I was never very into egg hunting as a kid and I tend not to like wasting food for silly things. But using egg shaped minerals would have been right up my alley and sounds so cool.

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Sure it's not manufactured? An egg shape is a popular collector / souvenir item for lots of minerals. (I've got one made from Solnhofen limestone.) And such a thing might well even have been used in an Easter-egg hunt.

On the why fake eggs front, when I was a kid one thing you saw in colonial museum gift shops was glass eggs. The story was that sometimes chickens were too stupid to know they are supposed to lay eggs, or too stupid to sit on them or something. So you put a glass egg in the nest to let her know what to do and where to do it.

Having said that after not thinking about it for 30+ years, I am wondering if that was a just-so story or something, as several bits of it seem implausible to adult-me.

[(E)]

Another kind of fake egg is a porcelain egg. They are used to keep chickens believing they have an egg left in their nest after the edible ones are removed.

Another possibility anyway

[mukibear]

my best way of knowing that it's not manufactured is that this is my family, and i've never heard of such. would y'all like to see a pic? can i do that here?

[johndallman]

The gift shops in various WWII-related visitor attractions in London sell rubber eggs. They are visually completely convincing brown eggs, but the difference is obvious on touching them. They're a joke about the dehydrated egg powder that was a common part of wartime rationed food. It was apparently OK in cakes and the like, but as scrambled eggs it was horrid.

[(E)]

I can remember ending up with a case of WW2 powdered egg (in NZ in the 80s-90's) still kind of edible and truely horrible. Good puppy food though (short chain proteins)

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by mukibear

can i {post a pic} here?

You can post a link to a pic (hosted somewhere on the web, whether a Dropbox account, Flickr, or whatever), but not inline the image into the post.