Rare dinosaur skull lights up creature’s bizarre hollow head tube



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A reconstruction of the head of Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus from recently discovered remains.

Andrey Atuchin

A spectacularly preserved partial skull belonging to the rare species of dinosaur Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus has been discovered and analyzed for the first time in 97 years.

The skull, detailed in a new study from the journal PeerJ, shows the intact structure of the creature’s signature tube-shaped nasal passage, offering new clues to the evolution of the bizarre ridge, a subject of debate among paleontologists for years. decades.

“My jaw dropped when I first saw the fossil,” Terry Gates, a North Carolina State University paleontologist and lead author of the document, said Monday. “I have been waiting for almost 20 years to see a specimen of this quality.”

The tube-shaped ridge had an internal network of airways for breathing, but it could also have been used for communication.

“Over the past 100 years, ideas about the exaggerated tube ridge have ranged from snorkels to super sniffers,” said David Evans, vice-president of natural history at the Royal Ontario Museum. “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.”

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Here’s a look at the Parasaurolophus skull as it was originally exhibited in the New Mexico badlands.

Doug Shore / Denver Museum of Nature and Science

The partial dinosaur skull was discovered by Erin Spear, a fellow ecologist at the Smithsonian in 2017, while Spear was exploring northwestern New Mexico as part of a team of paleontologists from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

The three currently recognized species of Parasaurolophus have been found in excavation sites from Alberta, Canada, to New Mexico, in rocks dating back between 77 million and 73.5 million years.

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It is a reconstruction of a group of Parasaurolophus dinosaurs crossing the path of a tyrannosaurid in the subtropical forests of New Mexico, 75 million years ago.

Andrey Atuchin / Denver Museum of Nature and Science

The new study has for the first time found a way to connect species of tubular crested dinosaurs found in southern North America to species in northern Alberta, Canada. The skull specimen shows that the dinosaur crest was shaped much like the crests of other related duck-billed dinosaurs.

“This specimen is a wonderful example of amazing creatures evolving from a single ancestor,” said Joe Sertich, curator of dinosaurs at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and leader of the team that discovered the skull.

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