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An exceptionally well-preserved fossilized skull found in New Mexico in 2017 – the first to be found in 97 years – has revealed new details about its bizarre Elvis-style pompadour. Its analysis allowed paleontologists to definitively identify how such a structure developed on this dinosaur.
“Imagine your nose growing out of your face, three feet behind your head, then turning around to fix itself above your eyes. The parasaurolophus was breathing through eight feet of hose before the oxygen reached its head,” said Terry Gates, a paleontologist from North Carolina State University. department of biological sciences, in a statement.
The hollow tube on his head contained an internal network of airways and acted much like a trumpet.
“For the past 100 years, ideas about the exaggerated tube ridge have ranged from snorkels to super sniffers,” said David Evans, Temerty Chair in Vertebrate Paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada.
“But after decades of study, we now believe that these ridges primarily functioned as sound resonators and visual displays used to communicate within their own species.”
The animal is believed to have lived around 75 million years ago – a time when North America was divided by a shallow sea and many duck-billed dinosaurs, horned dinosaurs and early tyrannosaurs were said to have roamed the country.
“The preservation of this new skull is spectacular, finally revealing in detail the bones that make up the crest of this incredible dinosaur known to almost every dinosaur-obsessed child,” said Joe Sertich, Dinosaur Curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and the leader of the team that discovered the specimen.
Sertich and his team discovered the partial skull in 2017 while exploring the badlands of northwestern New Mexico. Only a tiny part of the skull was visible on a steep sandstone slope, and volunteers were surprised to find the ridge intact. Bone fragments found at the site indicated that much of the skeleton may have been preserved on an ancient sandbar, but the partial skull, part of the lower jaw, and a handful of ribs survived to erosion.
The skull belonged to Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus, previously known from a single specimen collected in the same area of New Mexico in 1923 by the legendary fossil hunter Charles H. Sternberg. It has a shorter and more curved crest than other species of this dinosaur – although this could be related to its age at the time of death. There are three currently recognized species of Parasaurolophus, with fossils found in New Mexico and Alberta dating between 77 million and 73.5 million years ago.
“He answered long-standing questions about the construction of the ridge and the validity of this particular species. To me this fossil is very exciting,” said Evans, who also worked to unravel the mysteries of this dinosaur. for almost two years. decades.
The research was published in the journal PeerJ on Monday.
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