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Massive Duck-Billed Dinosaur Found

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

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Big, With Lots of Teeth

Oct. 3, 2007 — The "Arnold Schwarzenegger" of duck-billed dinosaurs, representing a bulky, toothy new species, has just been identified from fossils excavated at Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, where a team of scientists today announced the find.

The 30-foot-long dinosaur, which stood about 10-12 feet tall at the hips and weighed several tons, is believed to be the largest specimen recovered from the site's 75-million-year-old Kaiparowits Formation. A description of the dino appears in this month's Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

Larger dinos existed in other parts of the world, but few duck-bills — named for their duck-shaped heads — had as much heft.

"This was a monster dinosaur," said Utah Museum of Natural History paleontologist Scott Sampson, who worked on the dig.

"It's like a duck-billed dinosaur on steroids, given its bulky bone structure and weight," he added.

Sampson and his colleagues named the new dinosaur Gryposaurus monumentensis, meaning "hooked beak lizard of the monument." Perhaps its most distinguishing feature was its teeth — all 800 of them.

Over 300 of the teeth would have been available at any given time to slice up plant material, while the rest served as reserves, since dino teeth would often fall out as they ripped through tough vegetation.

Sampson explained that large, plant-eating beasts, like modern elephants and rhinos, tend to be less choosy about their fare, making do with whatever edible veggies are around in large quantities.

Today, that mostly means grass. During the late Cretaceous period, the dino's diet could have consisted of ferns, flowering plants and conifers, such as evergreen trees, along with other, as-of-yet unknown, greenery.

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Massive Duck-Billed Dinosaur Found

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