Discovered a dinosaur nest with more than 100 eggs and 80 skeletons

Paleontologists have found 100 eggs and 80 skeletons of a dinosaur named Mussaurus at a site where they once lived in Argentina's Patagonian plateau.

The dinosaur nesting site is 193 million years old and is the earliest evidence of a dinosaur herd.

Graphic image depicting dinosaur nest - (Photo: INSIDER).

Many dinosaur eggs still have embryos inside, and they were discovered in clusters of 8 to 30.

Scientists also found Mussaurus dinosaur skeletons of the same size and age buried in one place. These samples are evidence that dinosaurs lived in groups.

"I came to this site with the aim of finding at least one beautiful dinosaur skeleton. We completed the search with 80 skeletons and more than 100 eggs," - researcher Diego Pol of the Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio of Patagonia and lead author of the dinosaur study told Insider.

The fossil egg is more than 190 million years old - (Image: INSIDER)

Previously, scientists thought that this type of dinosaur lived in the late Triassic period, about 221 million to 205 million years ago.

However, the new discovery shows that Mussaurus thrived during the early Jurassic period. It is evidence that the ancestors of Mussaurus survived the mass extinction event 200 million years ago.

X-ray image shows the embryo inside the egg - (Image: European Synchroton)

Argentinian paleontologists discovered the first Mussaurus skeleton at this Patagonian site in the late 1970s.

The dinosaurs they found were no more than 15cm long. They didn't know those were "newborn" dinosaurs . Therefore, the researchers named this creature "rat lizard" because of the ultra-small size of the skeleton.

Researcher Pol decided to rediscover the area in 2002 and found the first adult Mussaurus fossils there.

Those bones reveal "adult versions" of "rat lizards" roughly the size of today's hippos. They weigh about 1.5 tons, the length from nose to tail is about 8m.