The world’s oldest fossilised dinosaur eggs on display at Maropeng

January 10, 2011

By Tara Turkington

Some of the most exciting items on display at Maropeng at the moment are the world’s oldest fossilised dinosaur eggs, which are also the oldest known evidence of parental care. The Massospondylus eggs, 195-million years old, can be clearly seen with the aid of a magnifying glass and are part of the Treasures of our Past exhibition currently on display.

The exhibition is the product of a partnership between the Maropeng Visitor Centre and the University of Witwatersrand’s Bernard Price Institute (BPI) and Institute for Human Evolution (IHE), two institutes at the forefront of palaeoscientific research in Africa.

The clutch of dinosaur eggs were discovered in Rooidraai (“red corner”, named after the colour of the rock in the area) in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park in 1976 by the former director of the BPI, Professor James Kitching, while he was looking through scree from a blasting. On closer inspection while preparing the fossils, Kitching saw that there were tiny, delicate embryonic remains in two of the eggs. He stopped preparations immediately as he felt the embryonic remains were too delicate and fragile to be tackled by any South African fossil preparatory lab.

In 2000, Dr Robert Reisz of Toronto suggested that Diane Scott, his research assistant, had the necessary skills and patience to prepare the fossils. The eggs were sent to Canada, and nearly four years later the job was completed.

Field work at the Rooidraai site in 2006 uncovered more groups of eggs that are currently being prepared in Canada. That the clutches were contained in multiple layers strongly suggest that this area was a nesting ground to which dinosaurs returned season after season.

The story of Massospondylus

Long, long ago, about 200-million years ago, South Africa was part of Gondwana, a giant southern continent which eventually broke apart into Africa, South America, India, Australia and Antartica. The landscape around what is now the Golden Gate area looked very different then, with semi-desert to true desert conditions.

Massospondylus dinosaurs lived along the floodplains of major rivers that crossed this dune-covered desert. These creatures hatched from eggs about three times bigger than a hen’s egg, but grew into giant creatures four to five metres long.

Each breeding season, large numbers of Massospondylus returned to the Golden Gate area, to lay their eggs and to raise their offspring. They came back here because there was always water, and there was plenty of vegetation off which to feed.

One day, 195-million years ago, a mother dinosaur laid a clutch of six eggs. Inside the eggs, the tiny embryos grew to the point of hatching.

One dinosaur chipped its way out of its egg, hatching into a harsh environment, which was growing drier with time.

The tiny reptile was helpless, with no teeth, and depended on its parents to find it food and nurture it.

A second sibling from the clutch started to hatch, its head just emerging from its shell when disaster struck – a giant sandstorm was gathering on the horizon. It rolled across the landscape in a terrifying ball of sand and wind, picking up dust and growing as it went. Just as the tiny Massospondylus was struggling to break out of its shell, it was smothered by the dust storm, never to hatch properly.

A third Massospondylus, perfectly rolled in its egg and about to hatch, was also covered in the storm. The rest of the clutch of eggs would perish as well.

Over millions of years, the life-giving mountains eroded away, and the rivers they generated dried up. The dust storms grew more regular as the desert moved in. And in time, the Massospondylus genus and species went the way of the two embryos that died before barely being hatched – eventually becoming extinct.

 

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