It’s not quite Game of Thrones, but scientists have found dinosaur eggs in a place called Dragon’s Tomb in Mongolia.
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The report in PLOS ONE describes the find as a compact blob of rock, scarcely a foot long that holds the skeletons of at least three baby dinosaurs.
The Dragon’s Tomb dinosaur locality was discovered in 1947 in the Nemegt Formation of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert.
Dragon’s Tomb, in the Nemegt basin in the northwestern Gobi Desert, is a well-known location for finding Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils.
Perinatal specimens of Saurolophus angustirostris. With the help of the newly discovered fossils, the researchers may be able to build the whole Saurolophus family tree.
Scientists say the young dinosaurs were likely part of a nest originally located on a river sandbank. In fact, the new found hadrosaurs were probably at the very earliest stages of life – either they had just hatched, or were just about to.
The newfound duck-billed or hadrosaurs possess tiny physical features such as the skull length was around 5% that of any largest known Saurolophus angustirostris. The prenatal bones already resembled adult characteristics, including the upwardly directed snout.
What paleontologists have until now managed to determine is that, when they passed away and their bodies became fossilized, a few of their bones were not properly fused and they had not yet grown their characteristic crest atop their head, Science Daily informs. The remains were found near the fragments of eggshell indicating that the dinosaur babies were in the earliest stages of development.
“The poorly developed crest in Saurolophus angustirostris babies provides evidence of ontogenetic crest growth within the Saurolophini tribe”, said lead author Dr Leonard Dewaele, of Ghent University and the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. “The Saurolophini are the only Saurolophinae to bear supra cranial crests as adults”.
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Scientists aren’t sure whether the babies were still in the eggs or died shortly after hatching, but they believe they were already dead and partly decomposed when they were buried by river sediment.
