An honest journo friend protests this typical legacy mainstream media story about dinosaurs, “Dinosaur moms showed ‘limited maternal care’”:
Nesting site in South Africa shows female Massospondylus gathered to lay eggs and take care of their offspring,
The species utilizing the site was the six-metre-long Masso-spondylus, and females appear to have congregated in groups to lay their eggs and – at least temporarily – raise their young.
The discovery suggests at least “limited maternal care” may have been practised by the mother dinosaurs as the newborns gained weight and increased their chances of survival around the nest site.
Such signs of a “primitive form of parental care” and other evidence gleaned at the South African site underscore its significance “for understanding the evolutionary history of reproductive behaviours in dinosaurs,” the researchers state in their paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
– Randy Boswell, Postmedia News January 25, 2012
What bothers the journo friend about this otherwise honest piece of work is that we haven’t the least idea what “limited maternal care” means in the context, and no one bothers to ask the scientists.
That’s because the journalist imbibes, with his draft of lager, a Darwinist worldview in which there is some kind of “ascent” over time of nesting creatures, from less care to more care? Is there?
In the modern world, we have reptiles that lay their eggs and move on, come what may, and reptiles like the alligator who, most definitely, does nothing of the kind.
We don’t know that any evolution was involved because we don’t know how the behaviour originated, in either case. With alligators, it seems to be obligatory, due to the need to protect the nest’s temperature. But the alligator cannot understand that fact in a rational way, so just how the behaviour got started is still a puzzle.
Cow alligator defending nest from conservation crew:
Cow and bull alligator guarding nest: