Back in the eighties when I lived in Albuquerque I used to visit the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science quit frequently. I learned a lot about the prehistoric residents of The Land of Enchantment and how the majority of the state had once been part of an inland sea.
That being said, imagine my delight in discovering this really well researched article about the discovery of a Parasaurolophus (try pronouncing that!) skull in the state over at the Daily Mail:
Scientists have found an 'exquisitely preserved' skull of a herbivorous dinosaur species in New Mexico, known for its weird head adornment.The skull belongs to the iconic tube-crested dinosaur Parasaurolophus, which lived during the Late Cretaceous period, about 76.5 million to 73 million years ago.
Parasaurolophus were herbivorous reptiles that sported trumpet-like nasal passages which they blew air into through the so-called tube on their head.
This particular skull belonged to one particular species of the Parasaurolophus genus – Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus.
The newly-revealed specimen would have been roughly 20 feet long (6.1 meters) and around 7.5 feet tall at the hip (2.3 metres) in its day.
Despite its extreme morphology, details of the specimen show that the crest is formed much like the crests of other, related duckbilled dinosaurs.
It lived with other, crestless duckbilled dinosaurs, horned dinosaurs, and early tyrannosaurs alongside many emerging, modern groups of alligators, turtles and plants.
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