Tsintaosaurus spinorhinus

Tsintaosaurus was a plant-eater, with a massive battery of grinding teeth that would have efficiently dealt with tough foliage, even that containing the abrasive material silica. It could have easily dealt with fodder as tough as pine needles or cycad fronds.

This dinosaur is broadly classified as an ornithischian or bird-hipped dinosaur, and would have often stood upright on its hind legs. More specifically, it belonged to the hadrosaur or duck-billed group, many of which had elaborate crests on their heads.

Palaeontologists have puzzled over the unusual forward-pointing ‘horn’ on Tsintaosaurus for years. The discoverer of the species in the 1950s described the protrusion as a ‘nasal tube’, but later researchers thought the fossilisation process might have distorted the skull. They suggested that Tsintaosaurus may have had a backward-pointing horn, like the related Saurolophus, or not have had a ‘horn’ at all. Current thinking has accepted the presence of the horn, although it is thought that it wasn’t used to produce bellowing or honking sounds, as the horn is not hollow like that of some hadrosaur crests.

Hadrosaurs are known from North America and eastern Asia, where they were highly diverse, and from Europe, where fewer have been found. A number of latest Cretaceous hadrosaurs have been discovered in South America, and an almost complete skeleton of the related Muttaburrasaurus (an iguanodont) has been found in Queensland.

The Tsintaosaurus spinorhinus exhibited at Melbourne Museum was cast from a specimen collected from Late Cretaceous rocks in Laiyang County, Shandong Province, southeast of Beijing in China. It was a medium-sized dinosaur that was 7 metres in length, 5.5 metres in height, and probably weighed about 3 tonnes in life.