Dinosaur mummies
Several have been found with skin, and one even shows the outline of the animal in the rock.
Feathered and unusual · Beaked plant-eaters
Edmontosaurus
Edmonton lizard · ed-MON-toe-SORE-us
A very large duck-billed dinosaur with a broad, flat beak and a soft, fleshy comb on its head.
- Size
- About 12m long; 4 to 7 tonnes
- Lived
- About 73 to 66 million years ago
- Found in
- Western North America, as far north as Alaska
Ambles after you. Move your pointer and see.
To scale
How big was it?
The bars are drawn to the same scale. On these pages the animals are sized in proportion to each other as far as a screen allows: the giants are shrunk a little and the smallest are enlarged, so that you can see them all.
Good to know
Six things about the edmontosaurus
A comb like a cockerel's
A fossil found in 2013 showed a soft, fleshy crest on its head that left no trace in the bones.
A thousand teeth
Its jaws held around a thousand teeth, packed into grinding surfaces.
Bitten by T. rex
One skeleton has a healed bite on its tail that matches the jaws of a Tyrannosaurus.
It lived in the Arctic
Fossils from Alaska show it lived where winters were dark for months.
Herds of thousands
Huge bone beds suggest it travelled in very large herds.
The real thing
Photos of the edmontosaurus
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Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
What it ate
Conifer needles, twigs, seeds and leaves.
How we know
The mummies show its skin: small, pebbly scales, with a row of segments along its back.
Keep going
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