Dinosaurs A to Z
Hadrosauridae

Saurolophus sor-ROLUHFUHS

"lizard crest"

Generic ornithopod body-plan outline
You 1.8 m (5.9 ft) tall
Saurolophus 8.5 m (27.9 ft) long
as long as 5 people standing fingertip to fingertip
generic ornithopod body plan, scaled to length — not a silhouette of Saurolophus
Length
8.5 m (27.9 ft)
Period
Late Cretaceous (70–66 Mya)
Place
North America · Asia · Canada · Mongolia
Food
Herbivore
Clade
Hadrosauridae Dinosauria Ornithischia Cerapoda Ornithopoda Iguanodontia Duck-billed dinosaurs with tooth batteries.

Saurolophus (; meaning “lizard crest”) is a genus of large hadrosaurid dinosaur that lived during the Late Cretaceous period of North America and Asia, in what is now the Horseshoe Canyon and Nemegt formations respectively (about 70 to 66 million years ago). It is one of the few dinosaur genera known from multiple continents. The type species, S. osborni, was described by Barnum Brown in 1912 from Canadian fossils. A second valid species, S. angustirostris, is represented by numerous specimens from Mongolia, and was described by Anatoly Konstantinovich Rozhdestvensky. Saurolophus is distinguished by a spike-like crest which projects up and back from the skull. It was a herbivorous dinosaur which could move either bipedally or quadrupedally.

What we know

  • Named by Brown, 1912.
  • Body length estimated at about 8.5 m.
  • Fossils found in North America and Asia.

What we guess

The reconstruction notes for Saurolophus — soft tissue, color, behavior — haven't been written up yet. Only the recorded basics above are filled in so far.