ev what is your least and most favourite dinosaur
DINOSAURS YES LET'S TALK ABOUT THEM
maiasaura is my current favorite dinosaur! its name means good mother reptile or good mother lizard because when remains were found, paleontologists also found nests with eggs, embryos, and babies in a nesting colony! that indicated that maiasaura would have fed its young while they were in the nest, and the discovery was the first time that paleontologists had evidence for a giant dinosaur of feeding and raising their babies, so they named it maiasaura :'] these findings in 1978 and 1979 led to so many other discoveries that the area, the two medicine foundation, is now commonly referred to 'egg mountain' in western montana.
it lived in the late cretaceous period about 76.7 million years ago, was a herbivorous saurolophine hadrosaurid (duck-billed, named for their flat snouts that resembled a duck's). it was also a euornithopod. it was about thirty feet long, 8.2 feet tall, and had these spikey crests in front of their eyes that scientists theorize could have been used during headbutting contests between males during mating season. most of the hadrosaurs don't really have a lot to defend themselves with, and maiasaura follow this pattern, so they probably fled in times of danger. they do have strong legs and massive tails, though, and studies of the stress patterns on their bones show that younger maiasaura, less than four years old, probably walked around on their hind legs before they grew larger and walked on all fours. studies of bone also indicate that hatchling maiasaura did not have fully developed legs and was incapable of walking, another factor in concluding that maiasaura brought food to their young. over 200 specimens have been found of various ages, but they likely laid around 30 to 40 eggs at a time, in nests made of earth, about the size of ostrich eggs.
they lived in an area covered by montana, us, and alberta, canada, mostly in forests and woodlands. they lived in massive herds, possibly of up to ten thousand other dinosaurs. studies have constructed one of the most detailed life histories of any dinosaur known, so we can conclude a lot about this dinosaur and compare it to others!
we don't know when exactly maiasaura went extinct, but if they lived until the end of the cretaceous period, then they lived until the meteor hit around 66 million years ago.
tldr: giant vegetarian dinosaur that fed and raised its babies with many other friends !!
as for least favorite... i don't really have one? i think t-rex is beloved but overrated, but that doesn't make it my lesat favorite. if i was gatekeeping dinosaurdom i might say urbacodon, because they look objectively too much like a bird to be a dinosaur, but a lot of dinosaurs probably had feathers that we don't know about so <3
thank you so much for the ask lumi!!
