Online Easter Egg Hunts
Intrepid adventurers are celebrating the start of Spring and the arrival of Easter on our two virtual Easter egg hunts, one for adults and one for families. Following a trail of clues, players virtually visit museums and other places in the U.S. and Europe to discover eggs of all shapes and sizes: jeweled eggs, dinosaur eggs, a concert in an egg, buildings decorated with giant eggs, and more.
In creating those new games, we dug up plenty of interesting eggs and the stories behind them—more than we could use. So here are some of our favorite weird and silly stories about eggs from around the world.
Old-Timey Eggheads
Back in Victorian England, “birdnesting” was a perfectly respectable hobby for children and adults. What with the general lack of TVs and all that, people spent a good deal of their time outside, and oology, or the collection and study of wild bird nests and eggs, was a fun thing to do with that time.
Amateur oology was not so great, however, for the birds whose eggs were being snatched out from under them, and eventually the practice was outlawed. Enter the Jourdain Society, founded by Lionel Walter Rothschild, a nutcase who owned a zebra-drawn carriage. Members of the society risked life and limb to continue their hobby, and they showed up to meetings lugging around entire cabinets full of stolen bird eggs, which even in ye olden days was not a normal thing to do. You can learn much about the eminently strange Rothschild at the Natural History Museum of London.
Cracking Up
Did you know that Humpty Dumpty lives in an amusement park in Oregon? Well, once upon a time that almost changed. Nursery rhyme met reality a few years ago at the Enchanted Forest in Turner, Oregon, when their life-size sculpture of Humpty Dumpty did his famous thing. The rather rosy-cheeked egg man had sat atop his wall for 46 years before taking an inexplicable tumble. In the years since, Humpty’s original sculptor was able to put him back together again, even without the dubious aid offered by the king’s horses and the king’s men.
Size Matters Not
At least not when it comes to the eggs of the world’s largest dinosaurs. Titanosaurs, a subset of the long-necked sauropods, were the biggest dinos and the largest land animals ever known. But their eggs, found in mass quantities among the thousands of dinosaur eggs unearthed at Auca Mahuevo, in Argentina, weren’t big at all. While the adults could reach staggering sizes—longer than 100 feet and heavier than 200,000 pounds—their babies hatched at about the size of a modern goose.
The secret to sauropods’ sizeable success? They grew incredibly fast! Starting at only 11 pounds, they exploded to be more than 10,000 times heavier in only 30 years or so. That’s like if a normal human baby who was born at 7 and a half pounds weighed in at 75,000 pounds on their 30th birthday. You’d need a lot of birthday cake for that party.
Eggs? For Breakfast? Groundbreaking
We ragged on old-timey entertainments earlier, but what they lacked in prestige television and super-hero movies, they made up for up with song. Take, for instance, the musical stylings of Harry Linn, the virtuoso behind “Eggs for Your Breakfast in the Morning.” Go ahead, go take a look. Check out his straight outta Hobbiton outfit, and note the fine print that “E4YBITM” was also sung with “immense success” by two blokes not important enough to be pictured. In fact, there is evidence that Linn, a self-styled comic vocalist, was making bank—30 stamps a copy, whatever that means—off covers of his songs.
Speaking of songs that slapped, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has collected artwork from such absolute bangers as “There’s Another Jolly Row [or Fight] Down the Stairs,” the stinging “We’re Not Quite So Chummy as That,” and the heart-breaking work of staggering genius titled “I Shall Never Be Happy Again.”
Eggsistential Crisis Mode
Meet Gudetama, a very popular sad-sack egg yolk with a butt crack and a bad case of the blahs. Created by Sanrio, the Japanese company behind such characters as Hello Kitty, Gudetama exists simply to be weird, and silly, and a little sad, and very, very lazy. It’s tough not to relate to that at least a little after more than a year of lockdowns and quarantines and social distancing.
Anyway, the above video of Gudetama flopping around on a plate of fettucine and a weird man in a gold leotard doing a weird dance has 2.2 million views. So if you’re into that, enjoy! If you’re not, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on the state of the world. Or, as Gudetama would say: “Meh.”
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Credits: Lead image by Photo by Amy Shamblen on Unsplash; Egg breakfast photo by Eiliv-Sonas Aceron on Unsplash; Zebra carriage & Humpty Dumpty in the public domain; Sauropod photo by Ryan Greene