Motherhood in the Jurassic
 
      The mother raised up and peered at her nest of eggs. Soon they would hatch. She nuzzled them gently, then slowly and carefully settled back down on them. Right now, the eggs were the most important thing in to her and she would guard the eggs and the hatchlings that emerged.  Are we talking about a bird? No, but a very ancient relative of our present day bird. We are referring to dinosaurs.

     When we think of dinosaurs we tend to think of their more violent side. We've seen them menacing each other, mammals and even humans, striking terror into hearts and withering the brave. Paleontologists have come far in their understanding of these creatures. They have gone from slow sluggish dimwits to fast moving smart ancestors of our modern day bird!

      Eventually, of course, paleontologists  asked themselves where did baby dinosaurs come from. It had been known for some time that dinosaurs where hatched from eggs just as birds and alligators do today. The debate lay in whether the mother dinosaurs laid the eggs and then went on with their life, leaving the young to hatch and fend for themselves, or whether the mothers stayed with the young and took care of them. What was the nesting behavior of these huge animals?

     There was little evidence to indicate what mother dinosaurs were like until the year 1978. Two paleontologists,  Jack Horner and Bob Makela discovered a dinosaur nesting colony in Montana. It was an incredible find. The nests held fossilized dinosaur chicks and eggshell fragments. From this the scientists concluded that baby dinosaurs did stay in their nests for a time after they hatched.  Some current animal hatchlings make for water or some safe place after hatching, but these guys obviously stayed where they in the nest for awhile. Here, they must have been reasonably safe.

    It is a possibility that mother dinosaurs stayed near the eggs and  fed the young  the way birds feed their chicks --although other scientists have since pointed out that this doesn't mean that all  dinosaurs fed their young in this way. There was a wide range of types of dinosaurs and it is likely there was a variety  of nesting and rearing habits.

    There's evidence that the most birdlike dinosaurs showed the most birdlike  nesting behavior. In the 1920s fossil hunters in Mongolia discovered a birdlike dinosaur in a nest. They thought that it died stealing eggs, so they named it  Oviraptor, which means "egg thief."
Oviraptor was a smaller dinosaur, less than 10 feet long. It walked on 2 legs and used its upper extremities like hands.

      Then we discovered something more about Oviraptor, in 1993, Mark Norrell found a fossilized Oviraptor female sitting on her nest, like a chicken. The eight foot dinosaur and her eggs were buried by a sandstorm. Now, far from being egg thieves, Oviraptors are thought to have been good mothers. Other dinosaurs may have had similar nesting habits also. It is known that numerous species of dinosaurs traveled in herds or groups and they could well have had some sort of family structure. It may be a real case of Jurassic all in the family!