Bactrosaurus - Meaning: Club (spined or staff) Lizard
Bactrosaurus (bak-troh-sore-us) acquired its meaning 'staff lizard' or 'Club-spined lizard' because it was the staff, or beginning, of a new line of dinosaurs. It was a herbivorous dinosaur that lived in the woodlands of east Asia in the late Cretaceous, 97 - 85 million years ago, making it one of the earliest known hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs).
Bactrosaurus Characteristics
Like many hadrosaurs, bactrosaurus could switch between bipedal and quadrupedal stances, however, unusually they had large spines protruding from their vertebrae (backbones). Bactrosaurus was also unusual within the family Lambeosaurinae for the absence of a cranial crest. A typical bactrosaurus would have been 6 metres (20 feet) long and 2 metres (7 feet) high when in the quadrupedal stance. Bactrosaurus weighed 1100 - 1500 kilograms (2400 - 3300 pounds), with an 80 centimetres (31 inches) femur.
Six partial skeletons of this dinosaur have been recovered from Mongolia and China, the first of which was found in the same horizon as Archaeornithomimus. It was an early relative of Lambeosaurus, and shows a number of iguanodont-like features, including three stacked teeth for each visible tooth, small maxillary teeth, and an unusually powerful build for a hadrosaur.
Bactrosaurus was named in 1931 by Gilmore.
BACTROSAURUS CLASSIFICATION: |
|
Kingdom: |
Animalia (animals) |
Phylum: |
Chordata (having a hollow nerve chord ending in a brain) |
Class: |
Archosauria (diapsids with socket-set teeth, etc.) |
Order: |
Ornithischia - beaked, bird-hipped dinosaurs that were plant-eaters |
Suborder: |
Ornithopoda |
Infraorder: |
Iguanodontia - having spiked thumbs |
Superfamily: |
Hadrosauroidea - duck-billed dinosaurs |
Family: |
Lambeosaurinae - hollow-crested duckbills |
Genus: |
Bactrosaurus |
Species: |
B. johnsoni (type species named by Gilmore, 1931) |
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