Wido Dinosaur Egg Site Fossil Hunting Guide

Introduction

Wido is a small island in the Yellow Sea off the Buan coast. The hanja in its name, 蝟島, read as hedgehog island, and local accounts tie that to the shape it makes on a chart.

The rock that makes it interesting is the Wido Volcanics, a Late Cretaceous pile of tuff, andesite and lake sediment. Low in that pile, a red mudstone carries dinosaur eggs.

The Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources has worked the site since 2003. A description in Cretaceous Research in 2019 named a new egg genus from it, Propagoolithus widoensis.

Forty-one eggs lie in at least eight clutches across seven separate horizons. Animals came back to the same ground to nest, layer after layer, which is what lifts this site above a footnote.

This is a place to look rather than to collect. The eggs sit at a cliff foot on the shore, and you view them through a telescope from a deck above.

One note on the name. UNESCO's own page for the geopark calls this "the dinosaur egg site at Gochang". The egg site is on Wido, in Buan County, about 40 kilometres from Gochang across water.

Location and Directions

Wido belongs to Buan County in North Jeolla Province. The egg site is at Jin-ri.

GPS: 35.5958°N, 126.2924°E. That point is the village of Jin-ri rather than the outcrop. The fossil bed lies on the shore below the Gadeulneom viewpoint.

Ferries run from Gyeokpo harbour on the mainland. Buan County's timetable lists six sailings a day: 07:55, 09:45, 11:35, 13:25, 15:15 and 17:05. Weekends and holidays carry a 10 percent fare surcharge.

The county publishes no crossing time. Allow the better part of an hour, and check the timetable before you travel, because sailings shift with the season, the tide and the weather. A cancelled boat strands you on one side or the other.

A wooden stairway opened in December 2021. It runs down from the Gadeulneom viewpoint to a small observation deck on the shore, and there is parking at the top.

Go at low water. The fossil bed shows from the deck once the tide is out. At high water there is nothing to see.

What Fossils You'll Find

Dinosaur eggs, seen from a distance. They weather out dark against red mudstone, which is the only reason they read at all from a platform.

The eggs are close to spherical and roughly 10 centimetres across. They lie in clutches rather than singly.

Propagoolithus widoensis is the egg taxon described from here. Its shell units branch towards the outside of the shell, which no other faveoloolithid egg does.

That branching is why it needed a new name. Egg taxonomy runs on shell microstructure rather than on shape, because the animal that laid an egg is almost never found with it.

A 2020 study ran Raman spectroscopy on one Wido egg and detected amorphous carbon inside it. The material is still producing results.

Bring binoculars. A telescope stands at the deck, but it is fixed, and other people will want a turn.

Geologic History

The Wido Volcanics record a Late Cretaceous volcanic centre with a lake basin around it. Tuff, andesite and lake sediment stack through the sequence.

The egg-bearing mudstone sits low in that pile. Rivers laid it down before the main eruptions, and red mudstone of this kind forms on a floodplain that dried out between floods.

The 2019 description places the egg beds in the Daeri Andesite, in the Coniacian to Santonian, roughly 89 to 84 million years ago.

A zircon age of about 85.7 million years from the overlying Mangryeongbong Tuff sits close to that. The two figures come from different studies and are worth reading together rather than one against the other.

Volcanic ash then buried the nests. That is why they survived, because a nesting ground on an open floodplain usually erodes away before anything covers it deeply.

The same sequence gives the island the rest of its geology. Columnar joints, welded tuff and flow deposits all crop out within a few kilometres of the eggs.

Collecting Rules and Regulations

Collect nothing. The site is a geosite of the Jeonbuk West Coast UNESCO Global Geopark, and the eggs stay in the rock.

Buan County has chosen signs and published information over fences. The observation deck exists so that people can see the site and leave it untouched.

Respect that choice. A site protected by good faith rather than by a barrier is easy to damage and hard to police.

Korea protects designated natural heritage strictly. The Daewol Fold at Jin-ri, a recumbent fold about 40 metres across, became a Natural Monument on 12 October 2023.

Wido joined the Jeonbuk West Coast National Geopark in 2017, and the geopark took UNESCO Global Geopark status in 2023.

Report anything unusual to the geopark rather than moving it.

Safety

The stairway is steep and made of wood. It turns slippery after rain and in sea spray.

The observation deck stands at the foot of a cliff. Do not go past it onto the shore platform.

Tides govern the visit. Check a tide table for the Buan coast, and leave the shore well before the water turns.

Wido is a small island with limited services. Carry water, and do not count on food near the site.

The last ferry decides the shape of your day. Missing it means an unplanned night on the island.

Sources

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cretres.2019.04.001 https://doi.org/10.14770/jgsk.2016.52.5.623 https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2019.00349 https://www.unesco.org/en/iggp/jeonbuk-west-coast-unesco-global-geopark https://jwcgeopark.kr/attraction/526 https://www.pressian.com/pages/articles/2021120714352490132 https://www.buan.go.kr/index.buan?menuCd=DOM_000000104007002000 https://www.cha.go.kr/newsBbz/selectNewsBbzView.do?newsItemId=155704400&sectionId=b_sec_1