The discovery of a fossilized dinosaur in Canada is changing scientists' understanding of how extinct species actually looked like. A recently found fossil of a duck-billed dinosaur now suggests that the scaly animals had a fleshy comb on their head.
An international team of researchers discovered a well-preserved fossil of the duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosaurus regalis in Alberta, Canada, and discovered that the extinct animal sported a fleshy comb on its head, similar to what can be seen on modern-day roosters.
This is the first time that a fleshy comb was discovered on a dinosaur. Such combs are typically used by modern day birds as a sexual display structure. Hard crests have already been seen in other dinosaurs but soft-tissue display structures have never been seen before.
According to Phil Bell, a paleontologist at the University of New England in Australia, who was part of the research team, his initial reaction was disbelief when he put a chisel in a space where there should never have been skin and found evidence of a structure attached to the dinosaur's head. "Having a good idea of the outline of the animal, I put my chisel into the rock, not expecting to hit anything, and lo and behold, I realized I'd put my chisel straight through the middle of some skin impressions that shouldn't have been there."
The skull of the dinosaur alone does not give any hint of the fleshy comb which leads researchers to believe that other species may also have the same unknown features. "The fact that we have such a bizarre crest on a skull that has absolutely no indication of some kind of cranial ornament leaves the doors wide open to a range of possibilities in all other dinosaurs," Bell said.
Besides raising possibilities of other dinosaurs such as the T-Rex to having the same soft-tissue structure, the findings also shed light on the evolution of head crests and behaviors in duck-billed dinosaurs. Duck-billed dinosaurs, or hadrosaurs, were large herbivores that roamed North America 75 million years ago.
The researchers have published their findings in the journal Current Biology.
