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Foraging must have been both dangerous and exhausting for the parents. To maintain its own health, and to feed its large family, each parent had to collect as much as 75 kilograms of food per day. |
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The maximum distance Maiasaurs could walk in one day and still be able to return to the nest has been estimated at 23 kilometers. Since Maiasaurs have been shown to live in herds numbering as many as 2700 animals, nearby sources of food would quickly become depleted. Such large numbers of animals remaining within a nesting site for 60 days would most certainly attract the attention of predators. It is believed that by gathering in large herds, the Maiasaurs survived simply because the proportion of animals being killed by carnivores living in the region became relatively small. |
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