South Africa - Dinosaur nest found with 190 million years

Dinosaur embryo date back 190 million years
Photograph courtesy Diane Scott, University of Toronto

Paleontologists have found the oldest known dinosaur nests, containing several tighly clustered eggs —in a nearly vertical cliff in Golden Gate Highlands National Park. Both the nests and the previously discovered embryo date back 190 million years.

Photograph courtesy D. Scott

Found in the same park, in South Africa, where scientists unearthed the oldest known dinosaur embryo the new find confirms the idea that the region was a Jurassic nesting place used by a dinosaur species called Massospondylus carinatus.

The site predates other known dino nesting grounds around the world by more than a hundred million years, scientists reported this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

After the ancient fossil embryo was described in 2005, study co-author Robert Reisz, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Toronto, in Mississauga, said:

"we decided to go back to the original site and see if we [could] find embryos and nests in place in the rock wall,"
"After a lot of searching and walking on hands and knees and crawling ... we found a total of ten nests altogether in locality, which is amazing."