A Different Look at Good Mother Maiasaura

Roland Meadows had me ride over to his place for a visit, and his fiancée Stormie Waters was also stopping by. She wanted to go over some of her prospecting charts, then some details of their upcoming nuptials.

Conversation wandered, and Stormie said she wanted to have children. She mentioned reading that Maisasaura was a good mother dinosaur. This idea came from Jack Horner. He had been involved in some searching found several of their fossilized nests. It seemed that the young received care from their parents..

Maiasaura with young, Flickr / Eden, Janine and Jim (CC BY 2.0)

While I have no doubt that Stormie and Roland would be caring parents, doubt has been raised about the Horner scenario for Maiasaura. He holds the majority view that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Jack "saw" traits of birds caring for their hatchlings in the dinosaur fossils. I reckon he generalized a mite too much, as not all birds are good parents (especially brood parasites, the dirty birds). Also, not all evolutionists are in agreement with his views on this good mother business.

Something that keeps cropping up here and in other creation science sites is that Darwin's disciples lock onto one thing, confirm their biases, and neglect other possible explanations for what has been observed. A creationist model can be applied here involving the Genesis Flood, giving a different but plausible explanation for the evidence.

In mid 1978, then unknown American paleontologist John ‘Jack’ Horner and a friend visited a rock shop in Montana, USA. The owner gave them a small collection of tiny but intriguing fossil bones she had found. They were the extremely rare bones of baby dinosaurs. These bones would dramatically change how science and popular culture perceive dinosaurs to this day. . . .

. . .

Multiple nests, eggs and more baby dinosaurs were found in the 1980s; thus the area came to be known as ‘Egg Mountain’. Horner became convinced that the fossils of Maiasaura demonstrated a complex social behaviour unlike that expected from reptiles. Underdeveloped baby limb bones supposedly indicated an inability to leave a nest, and he thought that tooth wear in babies suggested an extended period of feeding in the nest. He wrote:

The entire article can be dug up at "Rethinking Maiasaura — Challenging the evolutionary interpretation of the ‘good mother’ dinosaur."