Jeremy Shere

Dinosaurs lived so long ago that sometimes it’s hard to believe that they were actually real. It’s even more difficult to believe that dinosaurs had something in common with us.

But they did. Take, for example . . . teenage pregnancy. It’s frowned on now among humans. But still, we tend to reproduce when we’re pretty young. And so did the dinosaurs. Andrew Lee, a researchers at Ohio University, and his colleagues have found that most dinosaurs became parents before they were old enough to vote, so to speak. T Rex, for instance, was laying eggs by the age of 18. Other dinosaurs were as young as 10 and even eight years old when they reproduced.

Questions abound. First, how do the researchers know this? Answer . . . by finding in dinosaur fossils a special type of bone tissue called medullary that stored calcium used to make eggshells. In birds, medullary tissue forms a few weeks before they lay eggs. Same for dinosaurs, evidently. The researchers looked at calcium-storing bone tissue samples from several dinosaurs . . . all of whom were apparently still in their teens while preparing to lay eggs.

Another paleontologist, Gregory Erikson of Florida State University, studied T Rex fossils that had been found with eggs nearby. They counted growth rings in the T Rex bones and found that the dinosaur was still developing when she became a mother.

Why did dinosaurs reproduce at such young ages? Because if they’d waited until maturity, they wouldn’t have much time to reproduce. The lifespan of many dinosaurs was around 20 to 30 years. So natural selection favored those that laid eggs when they were still young and spry.

Source: Discovery News