Young and Helpless: Fossils suggest that dinosaur parents cared
By Sid Perkins
A cache of seven fossilized dinosaur eggs that was discovered in South Africa almost 30 years ago but only recently studied in depth reveals that the animals, as youngsters, must have needed help. The finding also suggests how related species later could have evolved their immense statures.
Skeletal remains showed up in six of the 190-million-year-old eggs, each about the size of a chicken egg. The eggs rank as the oldest fossils of dinosaur embryos yet discovered, says Robert R. Reisz, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto at Mississauga in Ontario.