Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur Page #3

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You see, you know, many eggs...

There.

..for kilometres and kilometres.

Here's a nice one.

- Oh, that's a huge piece!

- Yup.

- And this is the actual surface of the egg?

- Yes.

Astounding.

Do you suppose they could have

been coloured like birds' eggs?

They may. Maybe they were off-white.

- We can't tell really.

- Yeah.

Well,

we can see all the tiny pores on the surface.

And the texture.

Yeah. What a beautiful piece.

You must admit it's pretty romantic.

THEY LAUGH:

I think it's incredible.

I think it's absolutely extraordinary

and I must put it back where I found it.

Thank you.

The fragments could tell us quite a

lot about how the dinosaurs nested.

But some, amazingly,

can do even more than that.

All these examples have

something quite special.

This one is my favourite.

And what you can see is a very

large patch of baby dinosaur skin.

How wonderful!

It's extraordinary.

- And this is not just an impression, this is the mineralised skin.

- It is.

Yeah.

Astounding.

The eggs were not just preserving the bones,

- they were also preserving the skin of these babies.

- Yeah.

This was just on the surface.

I remember picking this up

and brushing it a little bit

and then using my hand lens

and looking at this exact patch

of skin and I realised that

we had found something that no

person had ever seen before.

- You are the first human being ever to see a baby dinosaur's skin.

- Yes.

It was just an amazing...

amazing moment.

It must have been very close to hatching.

- It's almost complete, this thing.

- Yes, that's what we believe.

And then a flood...

Killed them all.

- Unfortunately for them, good for us.

- Yes.

Luis Chiappe has dozens of

complete eggs in his museum and

he allows me to examine some of his

most precious specimens for myself.

There are many other remarkable things

in these astonishing time capsules.

This one has got,

perfectly clearly, the limb bones.

Here is a skull.

That's the orbit of the eye,

there's the lower jaw, there's the snout.

This one also has a skull,

but on the tip of the snout you can

see a little spike which is like the

egg tooth that a bird embryo has to

help it crack itself out of a shell.

And here is a replica of what the complete,

un-crushed shell must have looked like.

With all these details,

it is possible to imagine how a

baby titanosaur entered the world.

BABY SQUEAKS:

To get an idea of how these

youngsters might have lived,

we can compare them with their

closest living relatives - birds.

Rather like baby ostriches,

a young titanosaur

would have been able to

walk soon after hatching.

They may well have gathered

into groups to give some safety

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