In a remote ravine along the Bolshoy Kemchug River, paleontologists from Tomsk State University have made a significant find; a possible dinosaur kindergarten.
Stepan Ivantsov, who works at the university, said, ‘We have an assumption that in Early Cretaceous times in the southeast of Western Siberia there were some dominant species of large predatory dinosaurs like Allosaurus or large Dromaeosauridae, up to three meters tall.”
The team was surprised to have only come across the remains of smaller dinosaurs about 1 meter in height. It is not known for certain why only the remains of small dinosaurs were found. “Perhaps it was a kind of ‘kindergarten’ – an area where the babies appeared and spent the first stage of their life,” Ivantsov said.
Another theory is that the remains are not of babies, but another, perhaps previously unknown, species of dinosaur.
Another interesting theory regarding this site is that it a “refugium” existed nearby, where some species of dinosaurs from the Jurassic period survived for several million years longer than the rest of their kind elsewhere in the world, taking them into the Cretaceous era. Archaeologists found both the teeth and bony tail-spikes of a Stegosaurus, and believe that other herbivorous giants survived at the refugium.
The finds have been sent for analysis at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, and the next step for the team is to determine what species the remains belong to, and work out for sure whether the area was indeed a kind of “nursery” or just the habitat of a small type of dinosaur.