Little dinosaurs slept, cuddled together

About ten years ago, Mongolian customs officers did not allow smugglers to smuggle out of the country a piece of stone with petrified dinosaur bones inside. This salvation was an invaluable gift for scientists, since the remains of not one but three small cubs of small dinosaurs, which were lying close to each other, were stored in a stone block: apparently, at the time of death, they were sleeping side by side. This behavior, reminiscent of modern birds, says a lot about the socialization of prehistoric reptiles.

Dinosaur feathers

Fossil bones belong to a new species and have not yet been named, but they can already be attributed to the family of oviraptorids - small bird-like bipedal dinosaurs. The adult was about a meter tall, and the length from the muzzle to the tail was no more than two meters. Found in a block on the Mongolian border, the species had a rounded crest that looked like a "helmet" of a cassowary - a modern bird with a bone growth on its head. Also, the dinosaur had feathers on the wing-like forelimbs, a toothless beak and a short tail with a fan of feathers on the end.

Since it is not known where and when the smugglers found the fossils, it is difficult to determine the age of the find: for this you need to know the age of the rock layer. Fortunately, the remains of an adult of the same species were discovered in Mongolia in 1998, then it was possible to find out that the fossils are about 68 million years old.

In the "contraband" fossil, the skeletons of three dinosaurs have been preserved, two of which are quite complete. Judging by their pose, they were sleeping at the time of death. This behavior, when several animals of the same species sleep together, has the name "community overnight" and is inherent in many modern birds. But what does that say about dinosaurs?

Family is the most important

Most likely, the dinosaurs discovered are brothers and sisters: modern birds and bats usually sleep in a group with their closest relatives. But to say this definitely, we must carefully study the age of each individual, the chemical composition of the bones. Ideal evidence would be information that dinosaurs were born in the same season, drank the same water and ate the same food. But until a final answer is received, the researchers still have to do a lot of work (in many respects “thanks” to the smugglers, who pretty much ruined the sample).

Oviraptorides are close relatives of birds, so it is not surprising that their behavior is very similar. But in birds, social life is very complicated, includes various hierarchies and the exchange of information between people in a group. It is not yet clear whether they inherited these abilities from the common ancestor of birds and oviraptorides, or whether each species developed them independently. We can only state the fact that small dinosaurs about 70 million years ago had to face the same environmental pressure as modern birds.