STL Science Center

STL Science Center

29 March 2016

The Papers Remain Similar

Lambeosaurus has not been a hot topic in recent studies. The reason is not that Lambeosaurus has been entirely researched and figured out. Instead, Lambeosaurus has simply not been a big player in recent research. Hadrosaurs are very interesting creatures but are not so interesting that they are heavily researched in a multitude of lab groups. Even if they were, there are a lot of different hadrosaurs in the fossil record and Lambeosaurus is just one of those many taxa. The papers and research that has been done on Lambeosaurus in the time since the dinosaur was initially discovered are extensive and cover a variety of topics. There are always simple descriptions of remains that are published as they are discovered. The remains in question here are some of the newest remains that have been recovered, relatively considering the history of Lambeosaurus. Descriptions often lead to systematic reviews, such as that by Ostrom which lead to the reassignment of Hadrosaurus paucidens as Lambeosaurus paucidens. In order to discuss systematics and to adequately describe the dinosaur there need to be papers on the anatomy of the dinosaur as well. Luckily for everyone here, those papers also explicitly exist concerning the anatomy, specifically, of Lambeosaurus. Many times we have to make do with a similar animal, but having a description of the anatomy of the animal in question is very fortunate. Putting all three of these topics together we can then delve into more specific anatomical questions such as craniofacial ontogeny and even postcranial locomotor studies (we do not study those sorts of things in our lab so much, but they are interesting topics and fun to consider and important to understand).

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