DEPOSITIONAL ENVIRONMENTS OF DINOSAUR EGG-BEARING STRATA OF CENTRAL MONGOLIA (ULAAN TSAV LOCALITY)

Mongolia’s Gobi desert is famous for its substantial quantity of dinosaur egg-bearing strata, as well as fossilized skeletons. Depositional environments can yield information regarding Mongolia’s past life based on sedimentological analysis. Inferences can be made concerning how ancient organisms interacted with their surroundings and other forms of life and in what settings they thrived. Depositional environments can also indicate what varieties of life forms inhabited a certain location. For instance, an aquatic environment would be inhabited by vastly different organisms than a terrestrial one.

In this study, sedimentological characteristics will be used to interpret the type of environment that a group of unidentified species of dinosaur chose as its nesting grounds. The nests, discovered during the summer of 2009 by Dr. Gerald Grellet-Tinner, Dr. J. Foster Sawyer, and Dr. Michael Terry of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, are located in central Mongolia’s Gobi desert. Although there are no known studies on dinosaur nesting sites at this specific locality, there have been previous studies of other nesting sites in Mongolia, which will be discussed.

The depositional environment of the Ulaan Tsav locality is unknown, though there are multiple hypotheses. The unidentified species could have been nesting in specific physical environments; such as at the base of dunes, near outcroppings of rock, in a floodplain, near a stream in basins, or on plateaus. This study will use sedimentological analysis to identify the paleoenvironment of the dinosaur nesting sites at the Ulaan Tsav locality.

An analysis of fifteen samples (collected by Dr. J. Foster Sawyer) will provide information on the depositional environment of the sediments containing the fossilized nests and shed light on the paleoenvironmental conditions.