Word: dinosaurs
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...atypically peaceful scene for those dino-eat-dino days. Amid the shallow streams of a broad floodplain, scores of huge, grazing female dinosaurs were making their nests and hovering near their eggs, as their predecessors had doubtless done for ages untold. But their tranquillity was suddenly disturbed. Out of nowhere came a flood of mud and silt, scattering the lumbering beasts and burying their progeny. The lively dinosaur nursery was lost forever...
...million years after that late Cretaceous calamity--give or take 10 million years--its telltale remains have poignantly resurfaced. At a news conference in New York City last week, as well as in a report in Nature, scientists revealed that they had stumbled upon the site of the doomed dinosaur rookery during an expedition to remote badlands in central Argentina last November. Scattered over a square mile of parched Patagonian soil, they found the whole or shattered remains of thousands of grapefruit-size, fossilized dinosaur eggs--so many, in fact, that they couldn't avoid crushing them underfoot or with...
...worldwide inventory of only five specimens). What's more, the beautifully preserved bits and pieces include tiny (about a tenth of an inch long), pencil-shaped teeth and mosaics of precise, miniature, lizard-like scales. Says American Museum paleontologist Luis Chiappe, another of the team's co-leaders: "Finding dinosaur embryos is rare enough. Finding the [soft, perishable] tissue that surrounded those bones is truly spectacular...
...immediate result of the discovery is that it solves a lingering puzzle. Similar spherical eggs have been recovered elsewhere in South America as well as in Europe, Africa, India and China, but no one could tell for sure what sort of dinosaur laid them. After examining the bones and distinctively shaped teeth of the fragmented embryos, some of which were close to hatching when they died, the researchers firmly identified them as a type of sauropod, kin to the familiar Brontosaurus (more accurately known as Apatosaurus) of comic-book fame. Had they survived, they would have been about...
...dinosaur with] hypertrophy of both the premaxilla and the anterior ramus of the maxilla...and has prominent epipophyses for muscle attachments. The neural spines increase in height rapidly in the middorsal vertebrae, forming a low median sail that is deepest over the sacral vertebrae." --Science