Dinosaur Eggs Discovered: Unscrambling the Clues

Expanding upon material in The Tiniest Giants: Discovering Dinosaur Eggs (1999), this more up-to-date title is geared for slightly older readers. It begins with the authors' serendipitous discovery of a major dinosaur nesting ground in Argentina's Patagonian desert. The eggs, buried in mud, meant that we had stumbled across the scene of a long-forgotten catastrophe. But what had caused it, and who were the victims? Upon identifying the fossils as Titanosaur remains, the authors go on to describe in dense, specific detail what the evidence has so far revealed or implied about the huge creatures' identity, nesting behavior, embryonic development, predators, and the cause of the eggs' destruction. Despite small, sometimes uninformative illustrations and a tangential chapter on the unlikelihood of cloning dinosaurs à la Jurassic Park, this entry in the Discovery! series remains a valuable, unusually authoritative presentation for serious students of prehistoric life. A scholarly bibliography concludes, as well as a list of book and Web resources. Peters, John