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.

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

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. When Tsintaosaurus was found, it appeared to have a forward-pointing, horn-like crest, but later work by palaeontologists showed that, in fact, Tsintaosaurus did not have a large crest. The cast in the exhibition reflects current thinking, with the protruding bone laying flat along the animal's nose. When the skeleton of Tsintaosaurus was preserved, the fossilisation process pulled this bone away from the rest of the skull to give it a horn-like appearance.

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.