Plant-eating dinosaur a "Cretaceous weed whacker"

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have found in southern Utah a nicely preserved skull with jaws containing 800 teeth, scaly skin impressions and other fossil remains of a new species of duck-billed dinosaur from 75 million years ago.

The bipedal herbivorous dinosaur, named Gryposaurus monumentensis, was about 30 feet long and pigged out on plenty of plants.

"What you're looking at with Gryposaurus monumentensis is basically the Cretaceous version of a weed whacker," Terry Gates, a Utah Museum of Natural History and University of Utah paleontologist, told reporters.

This is the fourth recognized species of Gryposaurus. The first was found almost a century ago. Gates said this discovery sheds light on what was going on in this part of North America about 10 million years before the dinosaurs went extinct.

Gryposaurus (pronounced grip-oh-SAWR-us) means "hook-nosed lizard," so named because of the sizable hump on the nose on the beast's large, somewhat square head.

Gryposaurus was a hadrosaur, commonly known as a duck-billed dinosaur because the wide, flattened front part of its mouth looked a bit like a duck's bill. This species was one of the larger hadrosaurs, but far from the largest. It was, however, the biggest dinosaur known from its ecosystem.

"EXQUISITE SPECIMEN"

Duck-billed dinosaurs were important plant-eaters of that time, and this one lived alongside relatives of the fearsome meat-eater Tyrannosaurus rex, herbivorous horned dinosaurs related to Triceratops and a variety of other creatures.