A crest like a trombone
The crest was hollow, with air passages running up from the nose and back down again.
The plant-eaters · Beaked plant-eaters
Parasaurolophus
Near crested lizard · PA-ra-saw-ROL-off-us
A duck-billed dinosaur with a long, hollow, curved crest sweeping back from its head.
- Size
- About 9.5m long; 2.5 tonnes
- Lived
- About 76 to 73 million years ago
- Found in
- Alberta, Canada; New Mexico and Utah, USA
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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 parasaurolophus
It could hoot
Scientists have built models of the crest. Blown through, they give a deep, booming note.
Nearly two metres
The crest could be 1.8 metres long, counting the skull.
Two legs or four
It grazed on all fours and ran on its hind legs.
Hundreds of teeth
Like all duck-bills it had batteries of hundreds of teeth for grinding plants.
A baby called Joe
A young one found in 2009 by a schoolboy shows the crest starting to grow as a small bump.
The real thing
Photos of the parasaurolophus
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
Leaves, twigs and pine needles.
How we know
Only a few skulls are known. Medical scanners have been used to map the tubes inside the crest.
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