Arabian Ostrich Egg Found

Some months back, a rare desert find was donated to the new Cultural Center museum of Saudi Aramco in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia: a complete, intact egg shell belonging to the extinct Arabian ostrich.

The museum is not scheduled to open for a few years yet, but it is now assembling its collections. Thanks to an Aramco employee, the museum's Natural History Gallery has a fine new addition.

Oil workers discovered the egg not long ago in a long-abandoned ostrich nest on the northern edge of the desert called the Rub' al-Khali, or Empty Quarter. It was the only intact egg in the nest, among many others that had been shattered.

Aramco desert expert Guraiyan M. Al-Hajri brought the egg to Dhahran, where he donated it to the Cultural Center.

Back in the 1930's, Arabian explorer Harry St. John Philby wrote about his own discovery of an intact ostrich egg in roughly the same part of Arabia. He noted that the bird had become extinct in that area some 30 to 40 years earlier.

Here is Philby's report:

"Maqainama (incidentally I was at the time exceedingly sceptical about the very name of the place as reported by Major Cheesman, though on that point I was wrong and he was right) is situated about 70 miles due south of Jabrin. The intervening country represents a sort of transition from steppe to sand and consists of wide alternating strips of the one and the other, a dull, dreary country with good pasturage in favourable seasons. In it hares and other game abound, and we found a single complete but broken ostrich egg in situ to remind us that before the advent of modern firearms the great bird was an inhabitant of these parts. It became extinct here about forty or fifty years ago, and is now confined to the deserts of northern Arabia around Jauf."

– H. St. John Philby, “Rub' al-Khali: An Account of Exploration in the Great South Desert of Arabia under the Auspices and Patronage of His Majesty 'Abdul 'Aziz ibn Sa'ud, King of the Hejaz and Nejd and Its Dependencies.” The Geographical Journal, Vol. 81, No. 1 (Jan. 1933), pp. 1-21.