I grew up in a very specific time and place Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend had a large impact on my young brain. It held all the mystery and wonder of living fossils that would be celebrated years later with Jurassic Park. It wasn’t much, the mid 80’s animatronic baby diplodocus barely moved more than a background carnival prop, but it got my young imagination excited.
There was a 1968 TV-movie adaptation of Oliver Butterworth’s The Enormous Egg, where somehow by genetic throwback a triceratops hatches out of a hen’s egg.
Cool. I was completely unaware of this one.
Well, watch the show. I saw every ep.
You’ll see.
I didn’t make the show. It’s how they looked and acted in the show.
Just reporting what i saw.
Utterly ridiculous. But it was funny.
The paleoentologist(?msp) on the show were definitely the B-team. Nothing to see there.
(Barney, that big purple thing, would’ve been more accurate) IMO
I was hoping for a sequence between the sacs and the eggs, but hey, this is PBS.
I’d love to see the files of the things they didn’t use.
** Yes, that dinosaur sex manual, the Joy of Sacs.
Yes, many plant eaters did travel in herds for protection. From what I have read, hardly any cared for their young after the eggs hatched, Maiasaura may be an exception.
Crocodiles and alligators also play, so by phylogenetic bracketing it seems likely dinosaurs did too.
Crocodilians branched off the Archosauria tree well before dinosaurs evolved.
That said, “dinosaurs” are a huge group so it’s entirely possible that some played. But it’s not a measure for “dinosaurs” in general.
Here is a scientific article about how play is relatively rare among animal species and, even among phyla that demonstrate it, it’s not universal among species within.
The 1897 painting by dinosaur wizard Charles Knight appears to show two Laelaps playing (some say they’re fighting, but it looks like play to me):
Skeletons in the New Jersey State Museum have been reconstructed in the same pose
This is one of the first depictions of dinosaurs as highly active creatures, unlike the sluggish lizards they’d been depicted as. It;s unclear exactly who was responsible for this remarkable pose, Knight or his mentor Edward Drinker Cope.
Sadly, “Laelaps” has been renamed from that name (the name of one of Acteon’s hounds i Greek mythology) to the dreadful-sounding Dryptosaurus (“Tearing Lizard”)
The internet seems to call the painting “Fighting Laelaps” but I don’t know if Knight gave it that title or it’s just a “We gotta call it something” thing. Always down for some Charles Knight dino-art though 
I’d always seen that painting described as a portrayal of Allosaurus. Possibly due to some specimens early assigned to the Laelaps genus being thought to resemble Allosaurus or later reassigned to that genus.
Speaking of dinosaur paintings, the one I’d really like to see in person is Rudolph Zallinger’s The Age of Reptiles mural at the Yale Peabody Museum.
I first saw Zallinger’s painting it in the Time/Life Book “The World We Live In”, which was a collection of reprints of the 13-part Life Magazine series.
I don’t think you can say anything about dinosaurs in general, any more than you can say anything about mammals in general. There were a lot of different types of dinosaur spread out across hundreds of millions of years. I’m sure they had every type of social structure we can imagine and a few we can’t.
I don’t have anything against the idea of some sort of dinosaur engaged in play, more pumping the brake on “We know what dinosaurs probably did by observing birds”. There’s 66 million years of evolution separating modern birds from the small slice of dinosaur-kind they had as ancestors. That’s enough time for us to go from scurrying tree-shrews to airing reruns of Love Island.
Skeptical about dinosaur communities replicating social insect colony structures 
If naked mole rats can, why can’t dinosaurs?
Sure, but if both birds and crocs do something, that’s a sign that it either evolved twice (possible) or was already present in the common ancestor (often this is more likely).
There are plenty of birds who live in colonies, so I could imagine a eusocial bird colony evolving. (And true birds evolved 137 million years ago, so they’ve spent about as long coexisting with other dinosaurs as they have outliving them).
I was a child of the 1970s. My dinosaur fixes came from Saturday morning TV.
Land of the Lost (the 1974 version by Sid and Marty Krofft.)
Dinosaurs in the series were created using a combination of stop motion animation miniatures, rear-projection film effects, and occasional hand puppets for close-ups of dinosaur heads. The series marked a rare example of matting filmed stop-motion sequences with videotape live action, so as to avoid the telltale blue ‘fringe’ produced in matting with less exacting processes. Though this occasionally worked very well, the difference in lighting between the video and film sequences sometimes brought inadvertent attention to the limitations of the process.[citation needed]
Special-effects footage was frequently reused. Additional visual effects were achieved using manual film overlay techniques, the low-tech ancestor to later motion control photography.
Also in 1974 was Valley of the Dinosaurs plain old animation. Hanna-Barbera
In 1981 came the Ringo Starr film Caveman . Jim Danforth oversaw the stop-motion animation.
Danforth was a major participant in the special effects sequences, but left the film “about two-thirds of the way” (his words) through the work because the Directors Guild of America prohibited his contracted on-screen credit, co-direction with Carl Gottlieb. Consequently, Danforth’s name does not appear on the film.[7]
Was that being claimed? I missed that.
I read a claim that we know dinosaurs did not play because lizards don’t having the brake pumped by pointing out what birds do so don’t “be so quick to conclude that ancient ones did not” … not a confident claim we know they did.
If dinosaurs had brakes it might explain the Chevron connection.