Unhatched Titanosaurs Identified

[Richard W Travsky <rtravsky@uwyo.edu>]

 http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/science/09/27/dino.babies.ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a nesting area once used by hundreds of generations
of dinosaurs, researchers have found a clutch of unhatched babies that
come from the last and most massive family of long-necked, plant-eating
sauropods.
                                              
Luis Chiappe, first author of a study appearing Friday in the journal
Science, says the baby dinosaurs drowned in their eggs just before
hatching when a river flooded some 80 million years ago in what's now the
Patagonia region of Argentina.

...Chiappe says the embryos found in the drowned eggs are from a
previously unknown species that is a later and smaller member of the same
titanosaur family.
...
Chiappe says the eggs were about the size of softballs, and the six baby
dinos analyzed were about a foot long. Fossil fragments of adults from the
same species, found nearby, suggest that when fully grown the babies would
have been about 50 feet long.
                 
"They grew about 50 feet in 15 to 20 years, which means they grew very,
very fast," says Chiappe.