Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
FOUR
Compiling a List
of Possible Victims
A Brief History of Dinosaurs
We arrived back in New York during the first week of December
1997. As detailed in our collecting agreements, Rodolfo and his
museum in Plaza Huincul gave us permission to borrow several of
the fossils we had collected so that Marilyn could prepare them at
the Peabody Museum at Yale University and Luis could study them
at the American Museum of Natural History. At the same time,
Rodolfo and Sergio planned to prepare some of the other blocks of
eggs at the Carmen Funes Museum. Our initial task was to compile
and whittle down the list of possible victims.
As mentioned earlier, large, round eggs such as the ones we had
found in Patagonia had been often identified as belonging to
sauropods, and those from the end of the Cretaceous were usually
attributed to titanosaurs. This preliminary identification had been
based on circumstantial evidence, including the large size of the
eggs, the occurrence of titanosaur fossils in the same rock layers as the
eggs, and that these types of eggs are found only in deposits that con-
tain skeletal remains of titanosaurs. However, sauropod dinosaurs
had not previously been discovered inside any of the round eggs
attributed to these dinosaurs, so we could not be certain of this iden-
tification. In fact, because of this very reason we could not be sure that
sauropods laid eggs at all, an uncertainty that led some paleontologists
to speculate that sauropods gave birth to live young.
55
