The species that laid the recently discovered eggs is known as Hamipterus tianshanensis. It lived during the early Cretaceous period and its wings stretched about 11 feet long. It also sported a thick forehead crest and had a mouth full of pointy teeth for snatching fish.

Xiaolin Wang, a paleontologist at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, and lead author of the study, discovered the eggs in a 120-million-year-old pterosaur boneyard in the arid Gobi Desert in northwestern China. When the pterosaurs thrived, the place was most likely a lush lakeshore. The team suggested that a strong storm most likely washed the eggs into the lake, where they were buried alongside pterosaur bones and preserved for millions of years.

When Dr. Wang discovered H.tianshanensis at the same site in 2014, he had only unearthed a handful of eggs. Later he found the motherlode.

The cache of well-preserved two-inch eggs stunned his colleague Dr. Kellner.

“If you were to tell me a year before that someone would find hundreds of pterosaur eggs at one spot I would have said ‘Yeah, yeah get out of here. Not even in your dreams,’” Dr. Kellner said. “But here we are.”