A massive, partly fossilized egg laid by a now-extinct elephant bird has sold for more than double its estimate at a London auction.
Christie's auction house said today that the foot-long, nearly nine-inches in diameter egg fetched £66,675 ($101,813).
It had been valued at £20,000 to £30,000 pre-sale, and was sold to an anonymous buyer over the telephone after about 10 minutes of competitive bidding.
Christie's scientific specialist James Hyslop poses for photographs with a sub-fossilized pre-17th century Elephant Bird egg at the auction house's premises in London
Elephant birds were wiped out several hundred years - but this specimen is intact and contains the skeleton of the unborn bird.
More...
Epic adventures: National Geographic showcases breathtaking images taken around the world by photographers vying to win 2013 Traveler Photo Contest
For your eyes only: Google bans buyers of £1,000 wearable computer from selling or even lending the hi-tech specs to friends
The oversized ovum, laid on the island of Madagascar, is believed to date back before the 17th century.
It doubled its pre-estimate of £30,000 fetching £66,675 at the auction
Flightless, fruit-gobbling elephant birds resembled giant ostriches and could grow to be 11 feet high (3.4 meters).
Christie's says their eggs are 100 times the size of an average chicken's.
The giant partly-fossilised egg of an elephant bird is being put up for auction at Christie's and is 30cm high and 21cm in diameter.
The elephant bird, which resembled an 11-foot-tall ostrich, is thought to have been hunted to extinction in Madagascar between the 14th and 17th centuries.
More than 260 lots went under the hammer in the Travel, Science and History sale at Christies, including curiosities of natural history, globes, scientific instruments, rare books and maps, alongside paintings and works of art from the ages of exploration.
Occasionally subfossilised elephant bird eggs are found intact and the National Geographic Society in Washington holds a specimen of an Aepyornis egg which was given to Luis Marden in 1967.
David Attenborough owns an almost complete eggshell, dating from 6-700 CE, which he pieced together from fragments that were given to him while making his 1961 BBC series Zoo Quest to Madagascar.
In March 2011, the BBC aired the 60-minute documentary Attenborough and the Giant Egg, presented by Attenborough, about his personal scientific quest to discover the secrets of the elephant bird and its egg.There is also an intact specimen of an elephant bird's egg on display at the Delaware Museum of Natural History as well as another in London’s Natural History Museum, London.