Protoceratops Nest Full of Babies

A 70-million-year-old nest of the dinosaur Protoceratops andrewsi has been found with evidence that 15 juveniles were once inside it, according to a paper in the latestJournal of Paleontology.

While large numbers of eggs have been associated with other dinosaurs, such as the meat-eating Oviraptor or certain duck-billed hadrosaurs, finding multiple juveniles in the same dino nest is quite rare.

This would be the strongest evidence yet of parental care of ceratopsians. That has been a topic of considerable arguments as of late. In fact, one of the papers in the book, Horns and Beaks, iirc, argued that ceratopsians abandoned their young to form their own pre breeding herds in NorAm. Now Protoceratops is not Triceratops by any means, but being related as closely as they (relatively) are makes it more likely that the NorAm ceratopsians gave as much parental care.