Oldest Dinosaur Nesting site discovered in South Africa

A 190-million-year-old dinosaur nesting site has been unearth during an excavation at a site in South Africa.

The nesting site is of the prosauropod dinosaur Massospondylus and has revealed major clues about the evolution of the reproductive behaviours in early dinosaurs. This latest nesting ground predates all previously unearthed nesting sites by almost 100 million
years.

The study was led by U of T Mississauga palaeontologist Robert Reisz and a group of international researchers. This is the oldest known evidence that the hatchlings remained at the nesting site long enough to at least double in size.

Researchers have discovered at least ten nests with each nest containing at least 34 round eggs clustered tightly. The distribution of the nests in the sediments indicate that these early dinosaurs returned repeatedly to this site, a behaviour known as “nesting
fidelity”, and likely assembled in groups to lay their eggs, (“colonial nesting”), the oldest known evidence of such behaviour in the fossil record. The large size of the mother, at six metres in length, the small size of the eggs, about six to seven centimetres
in diameter, and the highly organized nature of the nest suggest that the mother may have arranged them carefully after she laid them.

“The eggs, embryos, and nests come from the rocks of a nearly vertical road cut only 25 metres long,” says Reisz, a professor of biology at U of T Mississauga. “Even so, we found ten nests, suggesting that there are a lot more in the cliff, still covered
by tons of rock. We predict that many more nests will be eroded out in time as natural weathering processes continue.”

The fossils were discovered in the sedimentary roots from the Early Jurassic Era in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park in South Africa. This site has previously yielded the oldest known embryos belonging to Massospondylus, a relative of the giant, long-necked
sauropods of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

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Posted by Taimoor Tariq on Jan 25 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry