Day #16 on our Christmas Countdown is…
PARASAUROLOPHUS!
Parasaurolophus: the “Near Crested Lizard”
Parasaurolophus was a large “duck-billed” dinosaur from Late Cretaceous North America. It is an animal known for its musical head crest and its swan-like grace, so why on earth is this one so chunky?
Like many other prehistoric creatures, especially well-known ones like Triceratops, Parasaurolophus, and Gallimimus, our understanding of how they looked has changed over the years. Most reconstructions of Parasaurolophus follow the beautiful holotype skeleton (the first bones found and what all other Parasaurolophus fossils are compared with). With good reason, because it is one of those rare few that all the bones are neatly laid out like the “raptor” skeleton in Jurassic Park.
Because of how nearly complete it is, many reconstructions of this animal follow it very closely. The graceful curve of the neck and the interesting indentations in the spine…
For many years paleo-artists reconstructed prehistoric animals in a style we now call “shrink-wrapping”. In an effort to be conservative and true to the fossil, the illustration tends to put skin directly onto the bare minimum of muscle needed for the animal to move.
Now we have many more examples of preserved soft tissue. Fat, skin, muscles we might have overlooked before, and the possibility of different textures to skin or scales, or even extra bits like wattles. With this knowledge, many paleontologists are taking a closer look at some fossil specimens that were first discovered years ago, like the Parasaurolophus mentioned above.
If you want to take a look at the paper yourself, click here for the link to a lovely description of the holotype skeleton and all the injuries the animal lived through. It has beautiful illustrations and photos, including a reconstruction of how the Parasaurolophus may have received at least one of its injuries. But mostly I want to direct your attention to the proposed soft tissue of Parasaurolophus.
In a very small nutshell, the authors of the paper looked very closely at the neck vertebrae and ossified tendons (like the hard tendons in a turkey leg), and compared them with mummies of other hadrosaurs with skin preserved and several modern animals like cattle and giraffes.
They proposed that Parasaurolophus had a lot more muscle and fat than is historically shown, and that the chunkier reconstructions we’ve been seeing (like John Conway’s illustration in the book “All Yesterdays”) are looking more and more plausible.
Parasaurolophus has always been one my top 3 favorite dinosaurs, in big part because of its graceful appearance…but science is utterly uncaring of our personal preference and aesthetic, and I must say I am quickly warming up to the idea of a more bovine chonkiness to the animal.
So here is my exploration of a thicker Parasaurolophus, and I am just delighted with how she makes me smile just looking at her. I didn’t realize how minty she looked until I was done, and with the holidays so close…I’m thinking she looks like a Peppermint Patty. The kids really like that name, so it’s official now. 😀
A quick aside here for current news: Babysaurus was born at 1:15am on the 14th of December. 🙂 He is a beautiful and healthy baby boy, and we are both doing very well. I had hoped for the sake of the countdown he would wait until after Christmas, but there’s no stopping a baby who’s baked and ready to come out!
My buffer is gone and I am scheduling this post on the 15th. Drawing cute prehistoric critters is a relaxing and fun thing for me to do, so I hope to continue with the countdown posts, but I am also very much aware of the reality of having a newborn and recovering from the adventure of his birth.
Drawing, no matter how cute or fun, takes energy and focus. Lack of sleep from caring for a newborn, plus physical and mental recovery from the amazing marathon that is pregnancy and birth, takes every ounce of that energy and focus. So if a post is late in coming you’ll know what happened, and I hope you understand I’ll get back to it as soon as possible.
Once the countdown is done I’ll take my usual break until February, and we’ll see what happens from there. 🙂
See you tomorrow for day 17 of the Critter Christmas Countdown!
Pete's Paleo Petshop 
As a Dinosaur King Reference and a cute name for a female Parasaurolophus , Paris. For a Male Para
LikeLiked by 1 person
Never mind she has a name already
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m proud of your recent child (I believe this is your sixth). Despite this, I also understand how difficult it is on your end to simultaneously take care of both the newborn and get these posts up. Coping with sudden changes in schedules this months is apparently something we have in common; on my end, I had to go to Peru to support my mother after the recent death of my maternal grandmother. I didn’t want that to happen; I wanted to go to school like normal, but it had to happen. After this, take a rest/hiatus to focus on your baby and not overwork yourself. I will also have a guess for each letter of the alphabet regarding his name:
Ambrose, Bertram, Corwin, Dudley, Elian, Florentino, Garth, Harrington, Ishmael, Joachim, Keenan, Leander, Milton, Neizan, Oswald, Pascal, Quillan, Raimundo, Sutton, Trenton, Uriel, Vincenzo, Wendell, Xanthus, Yadiel, Zephaniah.
I honestly expected you to talk about one of the several marginocephalians whose name begun with the letter P, but I see your justification for discussing Parasaurolophus. It appears you’ve given it a name; though that may not be final. With this now being your fourth ornithopod covered for this year, I feel like you should try focusing your attention on a marginocephalian or a non-stegosaur thyreophoran.
But if you did not talk about one of the several marginocephalians whose name begun with the letter P, then I will. My focus for the 16th will be Pentaceratops, a ceratopsian from the Cretaceous of North America. Most remains of it are known from New Mexico, and about a dozen skulls and skeletons have been uncovered, making the dinosaur fairly complete in its anatomical understanding. It had a short nose horn, two long brow horns, and horns each on its jugal bones. Its skull had a long frill with hornlets on the edge, hence its name, which means “five-horned face”. In 1921, a skull of this dinosaur was recovered. Two years later, the type species, P. sternbergii, was named. A second species, P. aquilonius, was named in 2014. This species, however, has since been considered dubious. Pentaceratops had a large body with a tall and wide torso. Its rear dorsal vertebrae bear long spines from which ligaments possibly ran to the front, to balance the high frill. It was part of the Chasmosaurinae subfamily, which also had Chasmosaurus, Kosmoceratops, and Triceratops.
Like all ceratopsians, Pentaceratops was an herbivore. As flowering plants weren’t as numerous back then as they are now, the dinosaur most likely fed on the more numerous ferns, cycads, and conifers at the time. It lived during the Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous and would have shared its environment with the Parasaurolophus species P. cyrtocristatus, Sphaerotholus, Nodocephalosaurus, and Bistahieversor.
Names for each:
Parasaurolophus: Patricia (shortened to Patty; this name was already decided by you in your post)
Pentaceratops: Penn
LikeLike
I fixed the non-existent link. Sorry! There is now a proper link to the paper where it says “click here”
LikeLike