Introducing Paleontology

Fossils provide link in dino crest evolution

Skeletal remains show how duck-billed dinosaurs evolved

skulls

SUPERDUCK  Estimates based on its skull (left) and skeleton put P. bergei at about 9 meters long. Its descendants, B. canadensis (right), didn’t have much bigger skulls, but their crests grew larger.

E.F. Fowler

By Helen Thompson

- More than 2 years ago

“Superducks” once roamed the Montana landscape. Montana State University paleontologists Elizabeth Freedman Fowler and Jack Horner described the large duck-billed dinosaurs with strangely tiny nasal crests November 11 in PLOS ONE.