American Museum of Natural History
FIRST DINOSAUR EMBRYO SKIN IMPRESSIONS DISCOVERED
UNHATCHED EMBRYOS ARE FIRST EVER FOUND OF GIANT
PLANT-EATING DINOSAURS
November 17, 1998 -- A team of researchers announced today in the journal Nature the discovery of a dinosaur nesting ground strewn with thousands of eggs, dozens of which still have unhatched dinosaur embryos inside. In addition to tiny embryonic bones, many of the eggs contain patches of delicate fossilized skin, providing the first glimpse of the soft tissue covering baby dinosaurs.
The extraordinary new fossils represent
a number of scientific firsts: the first dinosaur embryos to show fossilized
skin; the first known embryos of the giant plant-eating dinosaurs called sauropods;
and the first dinosaur embryos found in the southern hemisphere. As well as
appearing in Nature, the discovery is also featured in the December issue
of National Geographic. The nesting site, which dates from the late Cretaceous
and is approximately 70 to 90 million years old, is located near Auca Mahuida,
in the Patagonian badlands of Argentina. The research team, headed by scientists
from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the Museo
Municipal Carmen Funes in Neuquén, Argentina, named the new site "Auca Mahuevo"
for its tremendous abundance of eggs, or huevos in Spanish. Eggs are so plentiful
in the square-mile nesting site that it is virtually impossible to walk without
crushing egg shell fragments under foot.
If the tiny embryos from Auca Mahuevo
had hatched, the baby dinosaurs would have started life a mere fifteen inches
long and grown to an adult size approaching forty-five feet long. The fossil
skin reveals a scaly surface, much like the skin of a modern-day lizard. One
of the fossils has a distinct stripe of larger scales near its center, which
probably ran down the animal's back. Why Auca Mahuevo yields two of the rarest
of all types of fossils, fragile embryonic bones and skin casts, is one of
the mysteries about the site that the team hopes to answer. Initial studies
suggest that the egg clusters were laid in the floodplain of ancient streams
that periodically overflowed, burying the unhatched eggs on its banks in a
layer of mud. The covering of silt protected the eggs, and some of their contents,
from scavengers and disintegration by the elements. Repeated cycles of egg
laying and flooding could have produced the super-abundance of fossil eggs
and embryos found by the team.
Given the number of egg clusters at Auca Maheuvo, hundreds, if not thousands, of giant sauropod dinosaurs must have gathered there to lay their eggs. The nesting site probably would have stretched for miles in a valley created by a series of shallow streams. However, the fossils do not reveal whether the adult dinosaurs cared for their young, or even if they made well-formed nests.
It is not possible to determine precisely
which kind of sauropod dinosaurs laid the eggs at Auca Maheuvo, but the discovery
of tiny teeth in the eggs provides an intriguing clue. One embryo alone has
at least 32 individual pencil-shaped teeth, each small enough to fit easily
into the capital "O" at the beginning of this sentence. The only sauropod
dinosaurs alive at the end of the Cretaceous period with teeth this shape
were sauropods known as titanosaurs. The remains of these dinosaurs are common
near Auca Maheuvo, making it very likely that the embryos belong to this group.
Unlike any other known sauropods, titanosaurs had bony, armored plates embedded in their skin. The embryo's skin, however, does not show any signs of armored plates, indicating that these grew only after the dinosaurs had hatched. This growth pattern mirrors that seen in modern armored lizards and crocodiles, the juveniles of which lack the bony patches in the skin that are present in adults.
The co-leaders of the expedition are: Luis M. Chiappe, research associate, American Museum of Natural History; Rodolfo A. Coria, director, Museo Municipal Carmen Funes; and Lowell Dingus, research associate, American Museum of Natural History and president, InfoQuest Foundation. Other authors of the Nature paper announcing the discovery are Frankie Jackson, research associate, Museum of the Rockies, Montana State University; Anusuya Chinsamy, assistant professor, University of Cape Town; and Marilyn Fox, preparator, Division of Vertebrate Paleontology, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale.
The research received primary support from the National Geographic Society, InfoQuest Foundation, and the Dirección General de Cultura (Gobernación de la Provincia del Neuquén, Argentina).
The public can learn more about the expedition and the discovery on the Web sites of the American Museum of Natural History, National Geographic,and InfoQuest Foundation.
* * *
Return to Exhibition News List
Return to Science News List
Return to Main Menu
