Happy Mother’s Day 2025! A female Maiasaura provides a mouthful of ferns for her hatchlings to eat as her mate watches from behind. Maiasaura peeblesorum was a hadrosaur from the Campanian-aged Two Medicine Formation of North America that gained widespread fame and recognition as the first large-bodied dinosaur known to have practiced parental care after its nests and eggs with embryos inside were found in the 1970s at the height of the ground-breaking Dinosaur Renaissance. It soon turned out that, as with other archosaurs such as crocodilians, parental care was a widespread feature among dinosaurs, including birds, as evidenced by the discoveries of eggs and hatchlings belonging to the hadrosaur Hypacrosaurus, the early Jurassic prosauropod Massospondylus, ceratopsians such as Psittacosaurus and Protoceratops, the oviraptorid theropods, and many others.
