A brand new genus and species of lambeosaurine hadrosaurid dinosaur has been recognized in southern Alberta, Canada, relationship again 77 million years to the Campanian age of the Cretaceous interval.
Life reconstruction of Plesiolophus warnerensis. Picture credit score: Connor Ashbridge / CC BY 4.0.
“Hole-crested hadrosauroid (duck-billed) dinosaurs belonging to the clade Lambeosaurinae have been broadly distributed throughout the northern hemisphere in the direction of the top of the Cretaceous,” Carleton College paleontologist Bradley McFeeters and colleagues wrote of their paper within the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.
“Lambeosaurinae is inferred to have probably originated in Asia, the place early-diverging members have been current as early because the Santonian (86 to 84 million years in the past).”
“Extra derived lambeosaurines have been current in western North America (Laramidia) by the Early-Center Campanian (84 to 78 million years in the past), and attained their best recognized abundance and variety on that landmass later within the Campanian (till 72 million years in the past).”
Named Plesiolophus warnerensis, the brand new lambeosaurine species was recognized from a fossilized cranium roof and braincase discovered by fossil hunter Wendy Sloboda close to the Milk River Ridge Reservoir, near the village of Warner in southern Alberta.
The fossil got here from the layers of the Oldman Formation, a rock unit that has yielded surprisingly little diagnostic materials from the ancestors of the area’s later, extra various duck-billed dinosaurs.
“Plesiolophus warnerensis represents the primary diagnostic materials of an grownup lambeosaurine from this formation,” the paleontologists wrote of their paper.
Not like later members of its lineage, Plesiolophus warnerensis retained a number of ancestral options in its cranium.
But it additionally possessed unmistakable traits linking it to Parasaurolophini, a clade that finally produced the long-lasting hadrosaurid dinosaur Parasaurolophus.
To find out the place the brand new species match on the evolutionary tree, the researchers in contrast it with 87 different dinosaur species utilizing a phylogenetic evaluation.
The evaluation constantly recovered it as one of many earliest members of the North American parasaurolophin lineage.
“Plesiolophus warnerensis is recognized by a singular mixture of characters, however doesn’t seem like strongly autapomorphic, and at current can’t be excluded as a possible ancestor to Parasaurolophus, which happens within the overlying Dinosaur Park Formation,” the scientists wrote within the paper.
“In some regards, the morphology of the brand new taxon conforms to what might be predicted for a stratigraphically decrease consultant of Parasaurolophini: the higher morphological similarity to members of Lambeosaurini is reflective of being temporally nearer to the phylogenetic divergence from that clade, and the similarity to immature examples of later parasaurolophins is reflective of the heterochronic course of hypothesized to have produced the exaggerated crests for which the clade is understood.”
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Bradley D. McFeeters et al. A brand new parasaurolophin dinosaur (Hadrosauridae: Lambeosaurinae) from the Oldman Formation of southern Alberta. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, revealed on-line July 13, 2026; doi: 10.1139/cjes-2026-0013
