Building a Nest Egg

Encamped at the foot of the Flaming Cliffs in the Gobi desert in 1923, the Central Asiatic Expedition led by Roy Chapman Andrews was not looking for a dinosaur nesting site. No one knew what one looked like. Just a few years earlier, the Smithsonian's Charles Gilmore discovered a prominent layer of dinosaur eggshells in Montana but thought they were just freshwater clam shells.

How dinosaurs grew up was an opaque, bothersome question. Since bone hunters had concentrated on large trophy-grade specimens, juveniles were seldom recovered and eggs never identified. In 1915 paleontologist William Diller Matthew suggested that young dinosaurs lived in the drier uplands, returning to the swamps and river deltas only when they needed water to support their leviathan adult bodies.

Chapman's party was understandably astonished to discover entire nests of oblong eggs arranged in neat rings like rolls in a bread basket. To boot, they eventually found parts of over a hundred Protoceratops of all ages, which they assumed to be the animals that laid the eggs.

Comparing the dinosaurs to crocodiles instead of birds, scientists assumed that the creatures abandoned their eggs to chance rather than brooding them. The man with the privilege of naming all the specimens Chapman shipped home, Henry Fairfield Osborn, decided that the dinosaur skeleton uncovered atop a nest had been preserved in the act of robbing it. Osborn's name, Oviraptor ("egg robber"), maintained the image of dinosaurs engaged in the relentless one-on-one struggle for survival.

This reptilian behavioral profile and the continued insistence that dinosaurs were not very bright drowned out suggestions that they might be social animals. Swedish paleontologist Carl Wiman proposed that the duckbilled dinosaur Parasaurolophus played trombone-solo mating calls on its five-foot-long hollow crest. But the ever-practical Americans favored the crests as snorkels or air chambers for underwater life, so Parasaurolophus would remain silent for another fifty years.