Word: maiasaur
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...theory that birds are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs has received more confirmation from some baby maiasaur bones found in Montana. As reported in Science, the evidence comes in the form of fossilized growth plates -- disks of cartilage found at the ends of bones -- which act as a sort of scaffolding around which new bone can grow. The plates are found in mammals, reptiles and birds -- but the structure of the dinosaur plates was clearly birdlike...
...evidence for communal living was the fact that groups of nests were found in a single layer of sediment, implying that they were all built in the same year. Beyond that, the nests were spaced an average of 23 ft. apart -- about the size of an adult maiasaur. Birds often do the same thing, laying their eggs close enough together for maximum mutual protection, yet far enough apart so that they can move easily past their neighbors. Inside the nests, Horner found lots of tiny eggshell fragments. If the baby maiasaurs had simply hatched and wandered off to fend...
Such parenting behavior is unknown in modern reptiles and had been unsuspected in dinosaurs, leading Horner to name this new genus Maiasaura, or "good mother" dinosaurs. Later he found a cluster of such nests, separated from one another by about 25 ft., the length of an adult maiasaur. He argued that they dated from a single breeding season 80 million years ago and that dinosaurs returned to this breeding ground yearly, like migratory birds...
...much of his time to presenting dinosaurs as they lived day by day. At the Museum of the Rockies on Sept. 15, he will open a new dinosaur / hall in which, risking heresy, there will be nothing scary. An orodromeus scratches its jaw with a hind leg, and a maiasaur sits like a huge, impassive camel. In a corner a pterosaur stands on the ground, looking like an Audubon heron in a fun-house mirror. "I wanted the exhibits to portray animals," says Horner, "not just single events of aggression...
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