The hadrosaurs also lacked the horns and spikes of some of the other big herbivorous dinosaurs, leading to questions about how they defended themselves from predators, and the idea that they could escape by swimming into deeper water (where predators supposedly couldn't follow) seemed like a solution. For one thing, their generic name "duck-billed dinosaurs" comes from their broad and flat rostral bones which are similar to a duck's bill (most prominently seen in Edmontosaurus, also known as Trachodon, Anatosaurus or Anatotitan in older works), which may have led to the assumption that they fed on aquatic plants, although it's now known that the rostrum was not actually "duck-billed" in reality, because there was a squared-off keratinous beak attached in life. There are a few factors that led to this (ultimately disproven) hypothesis. " If it looks like a duck, then it probably swims like a duck."įor more than a century after their discovery in the 1850s, hadrosaurs were thought to have been semi-aquatic animals that lived in swamps and ate aquatic plants.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |