As Nievas approached, he realized that it was not a stone. The mysterious object was partially submerged in the mud, so he couldn’t see what it really was. While trying to remove the dirt from the round shape, he began to have other suspicions.
The object seemed to be covered in some sort of scales. Most of them were quite dark, but some areas were in curious shades of green. This knowledge did not help the Argentinian farmer identify his discovery, and he most likely would never have guessed what it turned out to be.
A Holiday Surprise
Jose Antonio Nievas, a farmer in Argentina, decided to take a short stroll and get some fresh air on Christmas Day 2015. He was walking along his grounds when an uncommon occurrence took place, which will now be part of his small town’s history forever.
The farm was a home for many different types of animals and plants, but nothing from Nievas’s agricultural experience could prepare him for what he found that day. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing, and it left him completely overwhelmed.
The First Sighting
The farm, owned by Jose Antonio Nievas and his wife, is situated in Carlos Spegazzini, a small city about 25 miles south of Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires. Nievas’s stroll took him past a stream on his property when something unusual caught his eye.
The big, round object was nestled in the mud at the back of the stream, and Nievas originally thought it was an enormous stone. When he moved closer to the item, he still had no idea what it was, but it was clearly not a rock.
A Helping Hand
Nieves tried and tried to clean up his mysterious find and dig it out of the mud for a better look, but he wasn’t having much luck. He decided that he needed help if he wanted to disconnect the object from the sticky riverbank.
Nieves told his wife, Reina Coronel, that he believed he had found something amazing and that he needed her help to retrieve it, but when he explained about the mysterious object, she thought he was playing some sort of prank on her.
A Dinosaur Egg?
Reina explains, “My husband went out to the car, and when he came back, he said, 'Hey, I just found an egg that looks like it came from a dinosaur.' We all laughed because we thought it was a joke.” But Nieves was actually completely serious.
In the end, she agreed to come out and help her husband, but it turns out that he was wrong about the object. The mysterious find would not have been a good fit for a real-life version of Jurassic Park, but the truth would leave the family no less astounded.