'One-in-a-billion' perfect round egg could sell for thousands

A perfectly spherical 'one-in-a-billion egg' could sell for thousands, after being found in a supermarket in Melbourne.

There are loads of items where you can understand why they would be worth a lot of money - a car is mechanically basically just magic, a beautiful piece of art takes a lot of skill to produce, or maybe the item is exceptionally rare.

However, some items seem frankly a bit more questionable in why they manage to command such high prices. One such thing is an egg which by a quirk of chance has come out perfectly spherical instead of, well, egg-shaped.

It's definitely interesting, something that would make you go 'huh, cool'. But paying hundreds or even thousands to have one seems like someone has more money than sense.

What would you even do with it? Wouldn't it go off?

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Nonetheless, it seems that for some reason there is a demand for unusually shaped eggs. You learn something new every day!

Newsreader Jacqueline Felgate described finding the un-ovoid egg, explaining: "I thought I would share this eggcellent find - in our egg carton we found a round egg, and after a quick Google realised it was one in a billion."

And it turns out it could be worth a hefty amount, too.

Instagram/@Jacquifelgate

"Literally one in a billion eggs are round and the last one that was found sold for over $1,400!"

While many people might be at a loss as to what you could even do with such an egg, it is possible to preserve eggs, or rather egg shells. Though, the practice is more commonly used by museums to preserve the eggs of wild birds.

For larger eggs, you need to make a small hole at each end of the egg and then scramble up the contents before blowing it out. For smaller eggs however this isn't necessary as if left in a dry enough environment, a smaller unfertilised egg can eventually dry out by itself.

One of the most expensive eggs money can buy is from the extinct Elephant Bird. These can be some 800 years old and are absolutely whopping, being 200 times the size of a chicken egg. That's a big omelette.

The Elephant Bird is thought to have been around 10ft tall and weighed over 440kg. Native to Madagascar, they were hunted to extinction some 400 years ago.

In 2013 an intact Elephant Bird egg sold at Christies for £66,675.

Meanwhile, dinosaur eggs typically fetch up to around £1,600 for a particularly good specimen.

What an eggstraordinary sum!