Parental Care

["Ken Carpenter" <KCarpenter@dmns.org>]

I have enjoyed the various discussions regarding the topic of parental care, 
which I will continue to stew on when I get around to revising Eggs, Nests and 
Baby Dinosaurs in a year or two. Keep in mind that I have never said that I do 
not believe there might have been some parental care by some dinosaurs. But I 
insist on keeping the hypothesis of parental care by dinosaurs separate from 
the proof of parental care. It is this misconception that there is uncontested 
proof that I have been addressing. I do find it somewhat ironic that some of 
you who have been most vocal about the accuracy (or lack there of) in some of 
the recent dinosaur documentaries on television have missed this point. The 
debate about r & K reproductive strategy is one point I'll have to elaborate 
upon in EN&BD. We may never know which strategy sauropods employed, or whether 
some taxa (families?) were r and others K. On the other hand, maybe the 
abundance(literally thousands) of sauropod (megaloolithid) eg!
 gs!
 in India, France, Spain, and Argentina, is telling us that sauropods employed 
r-strategy. That is a point none of your raised, but should think about. But is 
that proof of non-parental care? No, just that sauropods laid lots of eggs.

Ken

Kenneth Carpenter, Ph.D.
Curator of Lower Vertebrate Paleontology &
Chief Preparator
Dept. of Earth Sciences
Denver Museum of Natural History 
2001 Colorado Blvd.
Denver, CO 80205

Phone: (303)370-6392
Fax: (303)331-6492
email: KCarpenter@DMNS.org

For fun:
 http://dino.lm.com/artists/display.php?name=Kcarpenter