A Chinese woman stunned the internet with photos of a 20-year-old boiled egg that she had preserved as a young girl and then forgotten about. It has fossilized and now resembles a ruby.

The woman, surnamed Fu, posted photos of the fossilized egg on Chinese social media platform Douban, where they quickly attracted people’s attention and went viral. It wasn’t long before mainstream news outlets started contacting her about the unique egg, wanting to know its story. Apparently, the woman’s mother bought it for her 20 years ago, when she was still in primary school, because it was unusually small in size. Her mother boiled it for her to eat at school, but after storing it in a side pocket of her backpack, she forgot about it for three days and dared not eat if after that, thinking it had spoiled. But she didn’t want to throw the delicate egg away either, so she put it on top of their refrigerator and completely forgot about it for a couple of months.

When the woman’s mother found the egg again, it had already changed color to a dark, burgundy red, so she decided to keep it in a small jewelry box instead of throwing it away. As the years passed, Fu moved out of her parents’ house and forgot about the preserved egg, but her mother recently found it while cleaning and showed it to her. Not only had the egg fossilized further, but it now had the smooth texture of a plastic ball, with fine cracks all over it.

The photos of the decades-old egg made quite an impression on social media users. Some called it a ‘pharaoh egg’, while others wondered why it hadn’t rotted all this time. Mrs. Fu didn’t have all the answers, but she said that it might have something to do with the fact that it might have something to do with the cold, dry winter conditions in the area where she grew up. Experts have yet to confirm her theory.

If you think this egg looks strange, you’ve probably never seen ‘century eggs‘, the Chinese delicacy that looks utterly inedible.