Monday, March 16, 2009

Dino teens hung out together, got into trouble.

I guess all teens are dumb. I wonder if these dinos listened to emo too. From the Chicago Tribune:
Horsing around without adult supervision, a large group of adolescent and pre-adolescent dinosaurs died en masse 90 million years ago when they ran pell-mell into a mudhole, sinking to their doom as they frantically tried to pull themselves out.

Terrible as the consequences were of this apparent parental neglect, the dinosaurs' remains are providing a bonanza of new knowledge for a group of Chinese and American paleontologists who excavated the fossils in the Gobi Desert in western Inner Mongolia.

Many of the 25 individuals recovered were complete skeletons, so perfectly preserved that the remains of their last meals were found too. Because they are all from the same species, a two-legged plant-eater called Sinornithomimus dongi, or "Chinese bird mimic," the fossils yield rare insight into the social behavior of the animal.

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