Rare Egg Discovered to Belong to Endangered Jerdon's Courser with DNA Analysis

Researchers may have unearthed the egg of an extremely rare species-in a museum drawer. Scientists have found an egg from a plover-like species that may be one of a kind.

The bird, known as the Jerdon's courser, is from southern India, and has an almost mythological status. We only know of its existence from a handful of specimens, according to the Guardian. While it was assumed to be extinct for most of the 20^th century, a trapper spotted a live specimen in 1986 near the town of Kadapa in Andhra Pradesh. Yet eggs from this species are essentially non-existent.

Now, a researcher by the name of Alan Knox chanced upon the egg, which belonged to the Jerdon's courser.

"I was looking through drawers of uncatalogued eggs when I spotted an egg as belonging to this species," said Knox, the university emeritus head of museums who found the egg, in an interview with BBC. "It was one of those eureka moments-finding something nobody else knows about, something so rare and exciting. I could hardly believe my eyes. My first question was how do you identify something that the books say has never been discovered?"

Of course, finding the egg didn't prove it actually belong to the courser. The researchers took minute scrapings from the membrane lining from the inside of the shell.  They extracted DNA from these scrapings and then compared it to the DNA from two of the five total preserved skins of Jerdon's courser.

In the end, the researchers found that the egg did belong to the bird. The egg itself originally belonged to a collector that was in a set of several eggs; eventually, they were passed onto the Zoology Museum of the University of Aberdeen around 1978.

Currently, Jerdon's courser is critically endangered on the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species.

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