Paleontology
Toothy duck-billed dinosaur found

Artist: Larry Felder

This artist’s rendering of Gryposaurus monumentensis, a new species of duck-billed dinosaur with a massive bite, shows its robust jaws that allowed this species to eat any vegetation it wanted.

Ducks today aren’t really known for their bite. Duck-billed dinosaurs, however — especially Gryposaurus monumentensis, a dinosaur recently discovered in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah — are a different story. G. monumentensis may have been a plant eater, but it packed some serious bite, according to researchers from the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah, who published their findings Oct. 3 in Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. This large dinosaur, which lived 75 million years ago, had more than 300 teeth at any given time, and the fossilized jaw bones indicate that there were numerous replacement teeth waiting inside the jaw bone as well, meaning that this dinosaur may have carried more than 800 teeth. This creature could have eaten just about any vegetation it stumbled across, according to Terry Gates of the University of Utah, lead author of the new study. “With its robust jaws, no plant stood a chance against G. monumentensis,” he said in a press statement.

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