LOS ANGELES — Plesiosaurs — giant marine reptiles that ruled the oceans 75 million years ago — gave birth to single large babies and may even have nurtured their young, according to a new study.
F. Robin O’Keefe, a paleontologist at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., and Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, teamed up to study the only known fossil of a plesiosaur mother and her unborn baby. The ancient relic is considered the first evidence that these aquatic behemoths gave birth in the water instead of laying eggs on land, the researchers reported online Thursday in the journal Science.
The fossil was found by amateur paleontologists Marion and Charles Bonner while hiking in Kansas in 1987. It sat in storage until 2008, when O’Keefe and Chiappe took a closer look. They found a constellation of small bones spilling over from the larger fossil’s abdomen that appeared to be miniature versions of the adult ones. Los Angeles Times
