Hadrosaur

Hadrosaur. Artist: Kate Nolan. Source: Museum Victoria.

The fossil on display at Melbourne Museum is of a hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur from Alberta, Canada. This specimen is still embedded in the sandstone rock that it was found in, and is surrounded by the plaster-of-paris that palaeontologists used to protect the bones when they were dug from the ground. If this specimen was extracted from the surrounding rock and prepared, it would look similar to a Tsintaosaurus.

Unfortunately, we cannot tell the species of the specimen, as it is missing its head-and palaeontologists use the skull to identify the different species of hadrosaur. Fossils of dinosaurs are usually found with parts of the skeleton missing, and the partial skeletons of several individuals of the same species are often needed before palaeontologists can tell what that species of dinosaur looked like.