The fossilized remains of six young dinosaurs found together in a “nursery” at a site in China show these animals had started forming social groups much earlier than previously thought, scientists said on Thursday.

The find sheds light on the life of the beaked dinosaur Psittacosaurus and on the origins of social behavior in its descendants, including the horned Triceratops, said Paul Barrett, a paleontologist at Britain’s Natural History Museum, who led the study.

“We don’t know very much about the early behavior of dinosaurs in general,” he said in a telephone interview. “This discovery shows the early relatives were already social and living in groups.”

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CHENNAI, MAY 25. In spectacular finds, the Archaeological Survey of India, Chennai Circle, has unearthed a dozen 2,800-year-old human skeletons intact in urns at Adichanallur, 24 km from Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu. Three of these urns contain writing resembling the early Tamil Brahmi script. The dozen urns containing the skeletons form a part of about 100 fully intact urns unearthed in various trenches at the site, where excavation is under way. The urns were found at a depth of two to three meters. The finds may revolutionize theories about the origin of ancient culture in Tamil Nadu and the origin of writing in South Asia.

T. Satyamurthy, Superintending Archaeologist, ASI, Chennai Circle, the director of excavation at Adichanallur, said: “People generally think that megalithic culture is the earliest culture in South India, especially in Tamil Nadu. In our excavation [at Adichanallur], we have come across a culture earlier than the megalithic period.” The megalithic period in South India ranges from 3rd century B.C. to 3rd century A.D.

Dr. Satyamurthy called Adichanallur “the earliest historical site in Tamil Nadu.” The ASI would conduct “a thorough exploration of the area” to find out whether there had been any habitation nearby. If such a site was found, it would be the first discovery of its kind in Tamil Nadu. So far, no habitation belonging to this period had been found in the State. He described the discovery of writing resembling the early Tamil Brahmi script on the urns as “very important.”

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The need to convey ideas other than sound through words has led early man to discover visual means to communicate. The earliest form of visual communication were body signs and gestures. In time, man learned to express his ideas into art forms such as illustrations and cave wall paintings of animals depicting his earliest source of food and means of living through hunting.

As an inevitable economic progress came as a consequence to man’s discovery of farming and animal domestication, the need to preserve his ideas and other discoveries led to his discovery of writing.

Writing which is the preservation of and the preserved text on a medium, with the use of signs or symbols is to be distinguished from illustrating such as cave drawings and paintings.

Writing is the most important discovery that man ever achieved for it is through this that man preserved and handed down his knowledge for the next generation resulting to the modern societies that we have at present.

Historically, the earliest form of writing began during the time of the Mesopotamian people on 4000 BC which was a system of clay tokens representing objects or pictographs. By 3100 BC, this method of preserving records evolved into a system using a round-shaped stylus pressed into soft clay and by 2800 BC further evolved into a wedge-shaped stylus known as cuneiform which survived until 75 AD which at that time has already evolved into an ideographic system.

In China, discoveries of tortoise-shell carvings dating back to 6000 BC if deemed to be a written language would predate the Mesopotamian cuneiform for about 2000 years.

The Egyptian form of writing called the Heiroglyphics was dated to 3200 BC.

Today, writing system worldwide is being classified into six types which are:
1. Logographic ( Chinese characters ) from the word logogram which is a single written character representing a complete grammatical word.
2. Syllabic ( Japanese kana ) from the word syllabary which is a set of written symbols that represent or approximate syllables which make up words.
3. Alphabetic ( Latin alphabet ) from the word alphabet which is a small set of letters
( basic written symbols ) each of which roughly represents or represented historically a phoneme of a spoken language.
4. Abugida ( Indian Devanagan ) which is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one.
5. Abjad ( Arabic alphabet ) which is an alphabetic writing system where there is one symbol per consonant and no vowel representation.
6. Featural ( Korean hangul ) script represents finer detail than an alphabet.