Tsintaosaurus

Phylogeny: Dinosauria > Ornithischia > Genasauria > Neornithischia > Cerapoda > Ornithopoda > Iguanodontia > Ankylopollexia > Styracosterna > Hadrosauriformes > Hadrosauroidea > Hadrosauridae > Lambeosaurinae > Tsintaosaurini

Overview: The general body plan of hadrosaurids didn’t differ all that much between species. They were usually fairly sturdy animals that could walk both bipedally and quadrupedally and possessed keratinous beaks at the front of their jaws, paired with hundreds of tightly-packed, grinding teeth in the rear of the mouth. What makes them easy to distinguish was their head morphology. Those in the subfamily Lambeosaurinae often had extravagant crests of hollow bone atop their skulls, made up of expanded nasal bones, which took on all sorts of shapes between the different lambeosaurine species. Tsintaosaurus was one such animal, though our understanding of its crest has changed. In older restorations, Tsintaosaurus was depicted with a long and very thin, unicorn horn-like crest of bone, quite unlike that of any other known lambeosaurine. With the discovery of more material, it became clear such restorations were based on broken remains. Its actual crest took the form of a wide, backward-curving lobe-shape, probably used as a resonating chamber or for visual display.

Hadrosaurids, including Tsintaosaurus, are generally believed to have been highly sociable animals, so adaptations for courtship and communication are to be expected. Often, they lived in vast herds and many are known to have nested together in large colonies. They mostly fed upon low growing plants like ferns and shrubs, snapping stems with their beaks and processing the material with their extensive dental batteries. By hadrosaur standards, Tsintaosaurus was relatively large, estimated to be a little over eight meters in length. Its fossils are known from the Jingangkou Formation, part of the larger Wangshi Group, located in what is now the Shandong Province of eastern China. This geological deposit is dated to the Late Cretaceous. It may’ve coexisted with other dinosaurs from the region like Sinoceratops and Zhuchengtyrannus, though they tended to come from somewhat older sediments. Described in 1958 by the renowned Yang Zhongjian (C. C. Young), Tsintaosaurus takes its generic name from the city of Qingdao, located close to where it was discovered.