People have been trying to chart our world since ancient times and they have used various methods to do so. Up until it was proven that the Earth is indeed spherical in shape, most maps depicted the Earth as a flat surface and anyone who reached its edge would fall off. After the age of exploration and maritime navigation, we became more enlightened about the fact and we've been making more (accurate) maps ever since.
Nowadays, we rely on satellite technology and GPS to get a view of our world with even more precision. But several centuries ago, people simply used whatever materials and data they had to create maps. Some maps were carved in wood, stone, or metal. Others were illustrated in parchment. But other maps (and globes) were more creative than others. One such example is the eggshell globe, made from two lower halves of ostrich eggs.
The pictured example was found at a London map fair in 2012, and eventually found its way into the hands of a Belgian map collector named Stefaan Missinne. According to a paper submitted to the journal The Portolan (of the Washington Map Society) by Missinne, the ostrich egg globe is a near perfect duplicate of the now famous Hunt-Lenox Globe, a copper terrestrial globe that has held that title since about 1870.
The ostrich egg globe, which as yet does not have a name, has been dated to 1502-1508, and this leads some to believe that the egg was used as the design model for the Hunt-Lenox Globe. Both globes show the Americas (both north and south) as small islands in the far west Atlantic Ocean, but even with this glaring inaccuracy, it’s held that they are the first representations of the New World on a globe of any kind.
The ostrich egg globe however has one striking difference from the Hunt-Lenox in that "it is the very first map of any kind to show Newfoundland". Missinne also suggests that the globe was actually made by Leonardo da Vinci but scholars are skeptical that da Vinci had anything to do with it.
(Image credit: Davidguam/Wikimedia Commons)