Dinosaurs, like their living relatives, crocodiles and birds, laid eggs. There are hundreds of sites with dinosaur eggs and nests. They did not lay their eggs in trees – just imagine!
Where nests have been found, they show the mother dinosaur scooped out a hollow in the ground and laid anything from 10-30 eggs, sometimes in neat circles or rows. A recent discovery shows some dinosaurs at least incubated their eggs – that was a surprise, and evidently the parent had to settle over the eggs quite carefully so none of them were crushed.
[Above] Skull of a baby Massospondylus from the Early Jurassic of South Africa. [Image courtesy of Kimi Chapelle and Jonah Choiniere.]
But what do we know about the babies and how fas they grew up? Amazingly, there are now many wonderful CT scans of baby dinosaurs inside the egg, newly-born hatchlings, and juveniles of all ages. Palaeontologists can work out how they changed from cute, goggle-eyed little fluff-balls to adults, and how long it took. But how? Read the book to find out!