Washington: Seventy-two million years
ago, a dinosaur with a sail-shaped crest on the top of its head lived
at a Mexican seashore, munching plants and trying to avoid a cousin of
Tyrannosaurus rex.
US, Mexican and Canadian scientists on
Tuesday announced the discovery of Velafrons Coahuilensis, a
duck-billed dinosaur that lived about 7 million years before a big rock
from space wiped out the dinosaurs and many other creatures.
Its fossil was found in the rugged, dry terrain of north-central Mexico’s
Coahuila state.
“Velafrons was probably a beach bum,” said palaeontologist Terry
Gates of the Utah Museum of Natural History and University of Utah.
At the time, its shoreline home was lush, with rivers flowing into a warm,
shallow sea, the scientists said.
“It
would have been a beautiful time to have been there – very warm, very
Mediterranean-like,” Utah Museum of Natural History palaeontologist
Scott Sampson said. “But you’ve got to worry about the tyrannosaurs out
there.”
The creature’s head is its most remarkable feature.
Sitting on the top of its skull is a hollow crest, shaped a bit like
the sail of a sailboat.
Velafrons coahuilensis means “sailed forehead from Coahuila.”
Velafrons
and other similar duck-billed dinosaurs had nose bones at the top of
the head, with their nasal passages greatly lengthened and running
through large crests.
Scientists do not know the crest’s function, but think it may have helped
attract mates.
Air blown through the crest passages could have made a distinctive trumpeting
noise.
The
adolescent Velafrons was 25 to 30 feet long, and a full-grown adult
would have been 35 feet long, the researchers reported in the Journal
of Vertebrate
Palaeontology. That would have put the species
around the same size as the Tyrannosaurus rex – though it probably
wasn’t as vicious, being a plant eater.
The Velafrons fossils
were found in 1995, but it was not until 2002 that scientists – using a
jackhammer to get through the hard rock – managed to free the skull
from the ground.
Sampson said the remains of a horned dinosaur
related to Triceratops were also found, as was evidence that a big
meat-eater related to Tyrannosaurus was on the prowl. Many of the
dinosaur bones are covered with fossilised snails and clams, indicating
these animals lived near the shore.
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