Fossils from the southern tip of Chile are adding a wrinkle to researchers’ understanding of how duck-billed dinosaurs conquered the Cretaceous world.
Duck-billed dinos known as hadrosaurids were highly successful and lived on most continents by the end of the Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago. Now, a study shows that an older duck-billed lineage appears to have thrived some 72 million years ago in subantarctic South America, potentially millions of years before hadrosaurids reached the continent, researchers report June 16 in Science Advances.