Site Geology

The glowing reddish brown badlands where the discoveries were made lie on the flats adjacent to beautifully banded layers of sandstone and mudstone.

The area over which the dinosaur eggs are exposed is immense. Acres and acres of reddish brown mudstone were exposed, and every few steps a cluster of broken edds sat on the surface.

It became immediately clear from looking at the rocks that the dinosaurs lived on an ancient floodplain. This floodplain formed as South America drifted away from Africa, pushed by the enormous forces generated deep within the Earth as part of a geologic process called plate tectonics. Thin layers of sandstone told us that in ancient times, shallow stream channels had crossed the floodplain.

The eggs themselves were confined to finer grained muds and silts that were deposited during floods when the streams overflowed their banks. It appeared that the dinosaurs looked for places away from the streams in safer areas of the floodplain to lay their eggs.