Fossils from the southern tip of Chile are adding a wrinkle to researchers’ understanding of how duck-billed dinosaurs conquered the Cretaceous world.
“It’s yet another chapter in the dispersion of these dinosaurs that we did not know about,” says Jhonatan Alarcón-Muñoz, a paleontologist at the University of Chile in Santiago.
About a decade ago, paleobiologist Marcelo Leppe of the Chilean Antarctic Institute in Punta Arenas was searching for plant fossils in the Río de las Chinas Valley in Chile’s Magallanes region when he spotted fossilized bones. After bringing the finding to the attention of Alexander Vargas, a paleontologist at the University of Chile, researchers extracted the bones for study.
Alarcón-Muñoz, Vargas, Leppe and their colleagues determined the bones belong to a new type of duck-billed dinosaur — herbivorous giants that had flattened, waterfowl-like snouts. The remains included many body parts, with pieces of hip, limbs, ribs, vertebrae and skull recovered.
2023-06-16 13:00:00
Original from www.sciencenews.org