Fossil of Large Bird Casts Doubt on Dinosaur Egg Identification : SCIENCE FILE: An exploration of issues and trends affecting science, medicine and the environment.

French scientists have found a 70-million-year-old fossil belonging to a bird that may have been as big as the modern ostrich. And they said some fossil eggs, found in southern France and previously assigned to dinosaurs, could actually be bird eggs.

In a letter to the weekly magazine Nature, the four scientists said the fossil was part of a bird’s pelvis. “Although the proportions of the complete skeleton cannot be reconstructed, there is no doubt that it was indeed large,” they said. The scientists, from Paris, Vitrolles and France’s Dinosaur Museum, suggested a possible rethinking of the discovery of hundreds of thousands of fossilized dinosaur eggs. “The assumption that all those eggs are dinosaur eggs should be treated with caution,” they wrote.