London - To us, they will always be the flesh-ripping monsters with six-inch teeth and terrifying claws.
But to their offspring, male dinosaurs were great big softies who liked nothing better than playing dad.
Some carnivorous species had such a caring side they worked with the females to look after their clutch of eggs, research reveals.
Scientists found that shared parental duties were handed down from small meat-eating theropod dinosaurs such as troodon and oviraptor to modern birds, to which they are distantly related.
The findings by scientists at the University of Lincoln and George Mason University in Virginia, US, were published in the science journal Biology Letters. - Daily Mail