New Duck-Billed Dinosaur Species Found In Texas
The Aquilarhinus Palimentus is a new species and genus that made its appearance in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. To be more precise, only the skull of the new duck-billed dinosaur species was found at Big Bend National Park, Texas.
Tom Lehman, a Texas Tech University Professor who was a Master’s student in the 1980s, discovered some bones that were badly-weathered while researching rock layers at Rattle Snake Mountain. Along with his team, he collected the remnants, but they could not study all of them because some were stuck together.
Only in the 1990s, they concluded that the bones were from a hadrosaurid Gryposaurus thanks to its arched nasal crest and peculiar lower jaw. However, the full description of the specimen took years to make as the researchers considered it more primitive than the Gryposaurus.
New Duck-Billed Dinosaur Species Found In Texas
According to Dr. Albert Prieto-Márquez, the lead author from the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont, near Barcelona, there are no other hadrosaurids that are more primitive, so this comes as an advantage for the expert that want to understand how their heads evolved and their ornamentation, as well as their species of the source.
Hadrosaurids, or the duck-billed dinosaurs, are a herbivorous species that at the end of the Mesozoic Era used to be the most common. They used to eat plants that they would crop using their cupped beak supported by the jaws meeting in a U-shape.
The width of the beak differs from a species to another, which also means they might have even had different ways of eating. For example, the Aquilarhinus’ lower jaws meet in a peculiar W-shape thanks to which a more flattened and wider scoop is created.
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