While the reptiles buried their eggs, it is unlikely that they actively protected either eggs or young. There are very few accounts of such behavior even in contemporary reptiles, and it is difficult to picture Tyrannosaurus rex brooding on a clutch of eggs. For these reasons, the mammals may have won the primordial war of the vampires; at least some paleontologists believe that the demise of the dinosaurs was accelerated by nocturnal predation on reptilian eggs by the early mammals.
