A Mother Dinosaur Watches over Her Brood

A mother dinosaur watches over her brood. This is a photograph of the display at the Museum of the Rockies, where in the 1980s and 1990s the skeleton of Maiasaura stood beside a model of a dinosaur nest with growing hatchlings. The point is that just such a Maiasaura nest, found in a mountain formation in western Montana, was the first discovery in history to prove that among the giant dinosaurs there were those that fed their young and tended them until they had grown sufficiently. In time several Maiasaura nests were found in those parts, and the place was named Egg Mountain. It is known that the nests were laid out across entire nesting valleys holding thousands of individuals; they were built of soil, sand and twigs and lined with plants, and at night mothers of 7 to 10 metres would curl up over their clutch and keep warm first the eggs and then the hatchlings, which in their first year grew to a metre and a half. It is this solicitous trait of character that gave them their name, in honour of the Greek nymph Maia, whose image was associated with motherhood and the nursing of children.