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# A Mother Dinosaur Watches Over Her Brood
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/matushka-dinozavrikha-prismatrivaet-za-svoim-vyvodkom/
- Published: 2020-11-19T19:54:49.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:41:56.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Museums, Science, Palaeontology, Nature

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 a Maiasaura stood beside a model of a dinosaur nest with growing hatchlings. The point is that a nest of just this kind, 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 looked after them until they had grown sufficiently. In time several Maiasaura nests were found in those parts, and the locality was named Egg Mountain. The nests are known to have lain in whole valleys of nesting grounds, home to thousands of individuals; they were built of soil, sand and twigs and lined with vegetation, and at night the mothers, seven to ten metres long, curled up over their clutch and kept first the eggs and then the hatchlings warm, the young growing in their first year 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.