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. His analysis allowed paleontologists to definitively identify how such a structure grew on this dinosaur.
“Imagine your nose growing your face, three feet behind your head, then turning to attach above your eyes. Parasaurolophus breathed through eight feet of pipe before oxygen ever reached your head,” Terry said. Gates, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University’s Department of Biological Sciences, said in a press release.
The empty tube on his head contained an internal network of airways and acted a bit like a trumpet.
“Over the last 100 years, exaggerated tube growth ideas have ranged from snorkels to super sniffers,” said David Evans, chair of vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum of Canada.
“But after decades of study, we now believe that these ridges functioned primarily as sound resonators and visual displays used to communicate within their own species.”
The animal is said to have lived about 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 would have roamed the country.
“The preservation of this new skull is spectacular, eventually revealing in detail the bones that make up the crest of this amazing dinosaur known to almost every child obsessed with dinosaurs,” said Joe Sertich, curator of dinosaurs at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and team leader. who discovered the specimen.
Sertich and his team discovered partial skull in 2017 while exploring the hard lands of northwestern New Mexico Only a small portion 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 could have been preserved once on an ancient sandbar, but only the partial skull, part of the lower jaw and a handful of ribs survived the erosion.
The skull belonged to Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus, previously known from a single specimen collected in the same region of New Mexico in 1923 by the legendary fossil hunter Charles H. Sternberg. It has a shorter and more curved ridge than other species of this dinosaur – although this may be related to its age at death. There are three species of Parasaurolophus currently recognized, with fossils found in New Mexico and Alberta and dating to between 77 million and 73.5 million years ago.
“He answered long-standing questions about how the ridge is built and the validity of this species. For me, this fossil is very interesting,” said Evans, who also worked on revealing the mysteries of this dinosaur for nearly two years. . decades.
The research was published Monday in the journal PeerJ.