Painting by Doug Henderson

I've been traveling a lot lately, and am posting this blog from New York City where I'm working with a couple of my co-authors on two new books—one about dinosaurs and one about learning differences.  But as I was sitting here looking out at all the big buildings, it got me to thinking about how large dinosaur herds or other social gatherings might have been.  Many years ago we discovered a huge bone bed of Maiasaura that suggested that more than 10,000 Maiasaura died in a catastrophic event such as a hurricane or volcanic eruption—but just how big might these groups have been?  If 10,000 died that most likely means that there were many more that lived, so the original herd probably exceeded at least 20,000.  Modern wildebeest herds consist of more than a million animals, and these herds travel over pretty small areas, so maybe dinosaur herds were really gigantic as well.  It’s very interesting to think about stuff like this, and certainly easy to think about when a person is in the middle of New York City.