Lambeosaurus Papers

Many thanks must go out this week to David Weishampel who keeps almost all of his own papers well displayed and hosted online through Hopkins Medical's faculty sites. Two of his papers concerning Lambeosaurine nasal cavity construction and an acoustic analysis of potential Lambeosaurine noises, which, if readers remember we saw another version of this study from Weishampel done with Corythosaurus crests. The two papers having to do with Lambeosaurs look at that interesting nasal cavity construction as well as the noise which the crest may have potentially made. Anyone interested in the living behaviors of dinosaurs would more than likely find these two articles very interesting.

Two interesting papers about Asian Hadrosaurs have also surfaced today. One of these is from 2003 and names a Russian dinosaur as an Asian ancestor of Lambeosaurs. The skeleton, found in Far Eastern Russia, is described as the most complete dinosaur skeleton ever found in Russia and the most complete Lambeosaurine outside of North America. This is not the first skeleton outside of North America to be described as being a Lambeosaurine skeleton. Those honors belong to a skeleton found in Kazakhstan in the 1960's by Roshdestvenskty. This skeleton was briefly discussed in the 1968 paper and origins of lambeosaurines as well, though not in the great detail given to them in the 2003 paper.

Lambeosaurus continues to be a popular dinosaur in Hadrosaur circles and we can expect more papers over the years I suspect, which will be of great use to the paleontology community. These papers, though, provide a good look at the crest and, perhaps, the origins of the Lambeosaurs that we know of from North America in the more distant past of Asia.