An exceptionally well-preserved fossilized skull found in New Mexico in 2017 – the first found in 97 years – has revealed new details about his bizarre Elvis-style pompadour. Thanks to his analysis, paleontologists were able to definitively determine how such a structure grew on this dinosaur.
“Imagine your nose growing up in your face, three feet behind your head, then twirling around to suture above your eyes. Parasaurolophus breathed through eight feet of pipe before oxygen ever reached its head,” said Terry Gates, a paleontologist from North Carolina State University. department of biological sciences, in a news report.
The hollow tube upside down contained an internal network of airways and acted like a trumpet.
“Over the past 100 years, ideas for the exaggerated tube comb have ranged from snorkels to super sniffers,” said David Evans, the Temerty chair in vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada.
“But after decades of study, we now think these buds 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 duckbill dinosaurs, horned dinosaurs and early tyrannosaurs would have roamed the land.
“The preservation of this new skull is spectacular, finally revealing in detail the bones that make up the apex of this amazing 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 small portion of the skull was visible on a steep sandstone slope, and the volunteers were surprised that the top was intact. Bone fragments found at the site indicated that much of the skeleton may have once been preserved on an old sandbar, but only the partial skull, part of the lower jaw, and a handful of ribs have survived erosion.
The skull belonged to Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus, previously known from a single specimen collected in the same region of New Mexico in 1923 by legendary fossil hunter Charles H. Sternberg. It has a shorter, more curved crest than other species of this dinosaur – although this may be related to age at death. Three species of Parasaurolophus are currently recognized, with fossils found in New Mexico and Alberta and dating between 77 million and 73.5 million years ago.
“It has answered long-standing questions about how the summit was constructed and about the validity of this particular species. dinosaur. decades.
The research was published Monday in the journal PeerJ.