September 9, 2011 Think of a dinosaur. Any dinosaur. Got it?
Good. Now, chances are the dinosaur in your head is an adult
animal. In books, movies and just about every other medium in
which dinosaurs appear, adult animals almost always represent
the dinosaurian lineage. To some extent, that’s because baby
dinosaurs have been difficult to find and identify, but over the
past few decades paleontologists have been working up a deeper
understanding of the early lives of many dinosaur species. The
latest find to be announced, just published in the Journal of
Paleontology, offers some insight into what armored dinosaurs
looked like shortly after they hatched from their eggs. The
study, by Ray Stanford, David Weishampel and Valerie Deleon,
does not describe an actual skeleton, but rather the impression
of a tiny dinosaur body found in the roughly 112-million-year-
old rock of Maryland. It takes a moment of looking at the fossil
to pick out the parts. The top surface of the little dinosaur’s
head and the underside of