'Monster' duck-billed dinosaur remains found

[Owlscrying]

Chicago - Fossil hunters have discovered a new species of duck-billed dinosaur with an unusual toothy snout in a dinosaur graveyard in the western US state of Utah.

The monster herbivore roamed the planet about 75-million years ago during the Late Cretaceous Period, and was almost certainly the master of its domain, towering over the other dinosaurs that populated that part of the western United States at that time.

The creature had a powerful, beak-shaped jaw with 300 teeth capable of slicing through almost any vegetation, and up to 500 replacement choppers embedded in its mammoth jawbone - the lower part of which measured about two feet (70 centimetres) in length.

A full-grown adult could have grown to 30 feet (nine meters) in length, making this duck-billed dinosaur one of the larger hadrosaurs that ever stalked the earth.

The researchers dubbed the creature Gryposaurus monumentensis in honour of its hook-beaked jaw, and the location where it was found.

It is one of a dozen dinosaur fossils that have been recovered from this part of Utah - several of them entirely new species not previously documented by paleontologists.

go

[Shaftsbury]

The number of new fossils being discovered in North America in the last few years is amazing. Several new bonebeds have been discovered in both Canada and the US just in the last couple.

[Piney]

They find smaller hadrosaurs in marl pits here in New Jersey. But they were carcasses carried out to sea and munched on by predators so there isn't much to them.

Lapiche

[SameerPrehistorica]

wow.........amazing