Lambeosaurus lambei

Lambeosaurus lambei was a large plant-eating hadrosaur from Alberta's Dinosaur Park Formation. Its hatchet-shaped crest is built mainly from expanded nasal and premaxillary bones and encloses long, looping air passages. The crest changed dramatically as the animal grew, so small skulls once received separate genus and species names before growth studies united them. The airway could have modified sound and the conspicuous external shape almost certainly carried visual information, but fossils cannot recover a particular call or assign every crest form to a biological sex.

Its fossils occur between approximately 76.5 and 75 million years ago. Values shown here are approximate and reflect the current curated seed dataset.

The hollow crest rose above the skull and projected backward, with a forward-pointing bony prong that helped produce the familiar hatchet profile. Air entering the nostrils travelled through convoluted passages inside it before reaching the throat. A broad toothless beak cropped vegetation while stacked dental batteries sliced and ground it. Strong forelimbs supported quadrupedal walking, longer hind limbs allowed bipedal movement, and calcified tendons stiffened the back and tail. Adult crest anatomy was much more elaborate than the low, simple crest of juveniles.

• Hollow hatchet-shaped cranial crest with convoluted nasal passages
• Forward-pointing prong forming part of the adult crest profile
• Broad toothless beak backed by dense dental batteries
• Powerful forelimbs and longer hind limbs permitting two walking postures
• Calcified tendons stiffening the vertebral column
• Strong crest-shape changes from juvenile to adult growth stages

Sternberg family expeditions for the Geological Survey of Canada recovered important crested hadrosaur skulls along Alberta's Red Deer River in the 1910s. Lawrence Lambe initially referred them to Stephanosaurus, a name based on much less informative material. William A. Parks created Lambeosaurus lambei in 1923 to honour Lambe, who had died in 1919. Charles Gilmore's 1924 redescription selected the well-preserved skull CMN 2869 as the type and clarified why it could not be securely joined to the original Stephanosaurus bones. Later growth studies showed that several smaller named forms were juvenile lambeosaurines rather than distinct adults.

Discovery credit: Sternberg family field crews, Geological Survey of Canada.

Naming authors: William A. Parks.

The Dinosaur Park Formation preserves river channels, coastal floodplains, ponds and forested lowlands near the western shore of the Western Interior Seaway. Conifers, flowering plants, ferns and horsetails provided varied browse. Lambeosaurus shared the regional fauna with other hadrosaurs, horned and armoured dinosaurs, small theropods and tyrannosaurids, but the formation's fossil assemblage spans many habitats and hundreds of thousands of years.

Dental batteries and microwear identify Lambeosaurus as a plant eater capable of processing fibrous vegetation. Physical models and airway reconstructions show that the crest could resonate, while its species-specific external shape and growth strongly support a display role. Those findings do not reveal an exact pitch, a spoken language or whether one crest shape belonged to males and another to females. Bonebeds suggest aggregation among hadrosaurs generally, but individual social systems remain uncertain.

• Both the genus and species names honour pioneering Canadian palaeontologist Lawrence Lambe.
• The nasal airway folded through the crest before turning back toward the throat.
• Juveniles had low simple crests that became dramatically more elaborate during growth.
• Several supposed small crested dinosaur genera were later recognised as juvenile growth stages.

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1. 01
   Palaeobiology Collections

   Canadian Museum of Nature

   Open source
2. 02
   Corythosaurus intermedius, a new species of trachodont dinosaur

   William A. Parks · University of Toronto Studies, Geological Series 15 · 1923

3. 03
   On the genus Stephanosaurus, with a description of the type specimen of Lambeosaurus lambei Parks

   Charles W. Gilmore · Canada Department of Mines, Geological Survey Bulletin 43 · 1924

4. 04
   Endocranial anatomy of lambeosaurine hadrosaurids (Dinosauria: Ornithischia): a sensorineural perspective on cranial crest function

   David C. Evans, Robert Ridgely, Lawrence M. Witmer · The Anatomical Record 292 · 2009

   Open source