JEFFERSON COUNTY, Alabama -- Walter Anderton has had what he believes to be a 110-million-year-old dinosaur egg for a decade, but only last month did he try to look inside.

So he took it to his doctor.

Anderton, 82, walked through the door of Dr. Michael Vaughn's office at MedHelp on Lakeshore Drive the first week of December so an X-ray technician could take a look at it.

"He about croaked when I said I wanted him to X-ray my dinosaur egg," Anderton said.

But Vaughn agreed, and they tried to peer inside.

"We X-rayed it. There weren't any broken bones," Vaughn joked.

There weren't any bones to see, in fact. Anderton, an architect and longtime collector of fossils, gems and minerals, says the egg could have been so fresh at the time of fossilization that bones hadn't formed yet. Vaughn said it's possible the rock was so thick the X-rays wouldn't be able to get through.

They spent about 15 to 20 minutes -- during Vaughn's lunch break, so patients weren't affected -- tweaking settings in order to see what they could find.

"You can vary the strength of an X-ray by how much voltage you put through it," he said, "so we cranked it up all the way."

Anderton said he bought the egg for a few hundred dollars at a flea market more than a decade ago. He believes it was originally found in Mongolia. The seller said he bought it out of China before the country banned the export of its fossils for sale in 2011.

The egg weighs about five pounds and is about six and a half inches long.

While the X-ray was inconclusive, there could be other ways to determine for certain that it's a dinosaur egg. Alberto Perez-Huerta, a professor in the department of geological sciences at the University of Alabama, said images of the outside showed it looked like a dinosaur egg but that it would probably require more tests, such as a CT scan, to know for sure.

It isn't the only dinosaur artifact Anderton has in his collection. He has two fossilized bits of dinosaur teeth that he found in a river north of Montgomery about 15 years ago.

"They were in sandy, loose soil," he said of the teeth. "They were easy to get and separate."

Aside from those, he also has an extensive collection of fossilized trilobites -- aquatic creatures that lived between about 500 million and 250 million years ago. His trilobites range in size from about an inch to about a foot long.

Though it isn't his job, he's always been fascinated by what fossils can say about the past.

"Some people will not look at the Earth they walk on and see what God's left for us to study," he said.

He keeps the fossils -- and quartz, petrified wood and a 20-pound meteorite -- in his workshop on his property in Jefferson County near Hoover. It's almost a private museum, and he acts as a proud curator, telling the story of every artifact.

Anderton said he plans to find a better way to see inside the egg. Even though he wasn't able to see much of it, he was glad he got to share the egg with everyone in the doctor's office.

"Everybody who worked there had to hold that egg," he said. "Most days you'll forget what you did, but you'll never forget a day when you held a dinosaur egg."