You are going to nationalgeographic.com/tv and different terms of use and privacy policy will apply.
Tsintaosaurus has always been an oddball hadrosaur. That’s part of what made the shovel-beaked herbivore a favorite in dinosaur books and model collections. Instead of the domes or tubes seen in other crested hadrosaurs, such as the well-known Corythosaurus and Parasaurolophus, the weird Tsintaosaurus seemed to have nothing but a spike with a little fork at the end. This was a duckfaced unicorn. And since some artists thought such cranial decoration was a little subdued, they often added round, inflatable sacsat the spike’s base. But that’s bollocks. In PLoS One, paleontologists Albert Prieto-Márquez and Jonathan Wagner have given Tsintaosaurus a more dignified look with an expanded crest.
The mystery of what Tsintaosaurus actually looked like goes back to fossils from the Late Cretaceous of China that paleontologist Yang Zhongjian (also known as C.C. Young) described in 1958. In his reconstruction, Yang figured a tubular spike made of the nasal bones jutting from the dinosaur’s skull. But this ornament was so unlike that of other crested hadrosaurs that other researchers questioned whether the spike was a real feature. Paleontologist Philippe Taquet,...
Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society.
Copyright © 2015-2021 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved