Researchers find unhatched baby dinosaurs

Researchers have found a clutch of unhatched baby dinosaurs.

They come from the last and biggest family of long-necked, plant-eating sauropods.

The discovery was made in what is now the Patagonia region of Argentina.

They drowned in their eggs just before hatching when a river flooded some 80 million years ago.

Luis Chiappe, first author of a study due to appear in the journal Science, says the dinosaur nesting area was discovered in 1997. But researchers have only now identified the types of animals that used it as a nursery.

He says the embryos are from a sauropod type of dinosaur in a family group known as titanosaurs.

A member of this family group, argentinosaurs, lived 90 million years ago and is thought to be the largest animal ever to walk the earth - some 120 feet long and weighing more than 80 tons.

Mr Chiappe says the embryos found in the drowned eggs are from a previously unknown species that is a later and smaller member of the same titanosaur family.

Sauropods had small heads and long necks and their massive body ended with a muscular tail.

The animals foraged from tree tops, are thought to have lived in herds and were among the most successful of the dinosaurs, appearing in fossil records of nearly every continent starting almost 200 million years ago.