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Scientific American has an article about fossil dinosaur eggs. A new find, which consisted of about 15 nests and more than 50 eggs, was found in what is now the Gobi Desert. It dates to the late Cretaceous, about 80 million years ago and shows evidence of gregarious behavior. All the details appeared in a paper in the Journal Nature.
An exquisitely preserved dinosaur nesting site discovered in the Gobi Desert shows that some of these prehistoric animals nested in groups and, like birds, protected their eggs.
“Dinosaurs are often portrayed as solitary creatures that nested on their own, buried their eggs and then just went away,” says François Therrien, a palaeontologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology near Calgary, Canada. He co-authored a study published this month in Geology describing the find. “But here we show that some dinosaurs were much more gregarious. They came together and established a colony that they likely protected,” Therrien says.
