Dinosaurs in Space – Maiasaura

By | July 8th, 2008|Dinosaur Fans, Educational Activities, Main Page|0 Comments

The First Dinosaurs in Space – Maiasaura

Maiasaura was a large hadrosaur (member of the hadrosaurine group of duck-billed dinosaurs – distinguished by their lack of adornments and head crests).  It was discovered by the American palaeontologist John Horner in 1978 and officially named a year later.  The remains of this dinosaur have been found in western Montana, in the Late Cretaceous rocks of the Two Medicine Formation.  Few dinosaurs left traces behind providing clues as to how these animals lived and behaved, however, Maiasaura is a definite exception to this.  Over 200 individual skeletons have been unearthed to date, from hatch-lings right up to mature adults.  Jack Horner and his team discovered a Maiasaura nesting site that has yielded a great deal of information about how this type of dinosaur raised its young.

Maiasaura

It seems that Maiasaura looked after its babies (the name means “Good Mother Lizard”), very apt in this dinosaur’s case.  Fossils recovered from the nesting site, show that these animals made nest mounds out of mud, and may have covered any eggs laid with vegetation to keep them warm.  Hatch-lings that have been fossilised show teeth wear but their legs are not fully formed (undeveloped legs is  feature seen in the chicks of many birds).  This indicates that the babies were fed at the nest, as they were unable to forage for themselves.   It can be surmised from this data that the parents looked after the youngsters to a degree.  The nesting site seems to have been vast, with many thousands of animals at the site, this indicates that Maiasaura lived in large herds, or at least congregated at communal nesting sites.

Maiasaura

The person in the picture provides a scale so the size of this dinosaur can be estimated.  Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur.

Dinosaurs in Space

Maiasaura’s other claim to fame is that this dinosaur was the first to be taken up into space.  A piece of fossilised bone from a baby Maiasaura along with a piece of Maiasaura eggshell was taken into space by astronaut Loren Acton on a NASA mission in 1985.  Not a bad record for Maiasaura, being totally unknown just 7 years earlier, and then the first dinosaur in space.  The second dinosaur to travel in space was the skull of a Coelophysis, (Triassic Theropod).  The skull was sent into space on the US space shuttle Endeavour on 22nd January 1998.  It travelled to the Mir space station, one of a number of trips made by space shuttles to the orbiting station in the Shuttle-Mir programme.

Dinosaurs were not the first representatives of the Class Reptilia to travel in space.  Tortoises were used in some of the research programmes as manned space flight was being developed.  The first tortoise in space was launched by the Soviet Union in September 1968, as part of the research programme monitoring the potential effect of long space flight on humans.  Tortoises were ideal “guinea pigs” for such experiments, due to their ability to survive hostile conditions and to live on little food and water, characteristics recognised by early explorers on Earth, who often sailed with tortoises and turtles on board ship to provide a source of fresh meat into the journey.  We have no record of what happened to this particular tortoise after the capsule in which it had travelled returned to Earth.

To models of ornithischian dinosaurs like Maiasaura: Dinosaur and Prehistoric Animal Models.

As far as we can tell no adult birds have been sent up into space.  Chicken embryos were sent up into space as part of an experiment kit to test the development of chicks in zero gravity by the Americans in 1989.  This particular experiment had been scheduled to take place three years earlier but it was lost when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch on January 28th 1986.  Other fertilised bird’s eggs have been sent into space on subsequent occasions, no birds as far as our research shows.  It would be fascinating to find out how birds cope with zero gravity.  Effectively, once in motion they would not need to flap their wings, perhaps they could use their wings to stabilise themselves as they were subjected to zero G.

This article has been written in honour of Patrick,  for being such a well behaved little boy, we know he likes Maiasaura so we thought it would be a good idea to write an article for him.