“It has an excellent skeleton and it has a skull. It is the only primitive hadrosaurid found with a whole skull.” The research team named the dinosaur species Eotrachodon Orientalis.
A rough translation is “dawn rough tooth from the east.” The first duck-billed dinosaur was discovered in 1856 and was named “Trachodon” – a name that Eotrachodon plays homage to.
Erickson has even discovered an entirely new species of dinosaur that lived approximately eighty-five million years ago. In 2008, members of the Birmingham Paleontology Society discovered a complete skull, dozens of backbones, a partial hip bone, and several bones from the limbs.
Erickson ended up studying the bones alongside a few others, and they quickly determined that the bones belonged to an undiscovered dinosaur – a huge advancement in paleontology.
The team was led to believe it was one of the most complete duck-billed dinosaur skeletons ever to be found in the eastern United States. Its teeth show an ability to grind plants similar to cows or horses and are similar to early hadrosaurids, and it allowed them to chew and digest a wide variety of plants.
In an interview with the Tallahassee Democrat, Erickson said: “These dinosaurs eventually became the dominant plant-eaters around the world.”
The late Cretaceous Period, roughly 85 million years ago, had incredible differences as far as our landmasses were concerned. North America had a huge, one thousand mile sea dividing it into two halves, connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, stretching from Georgia and Alabama all the way north into Canada.
This created two landmasses, known as Laramidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. This skeleton suggests that dinosaurs of this species originated in Appalachia and then went on to disperse via land-bridges into other areas of the Americas.
This discovery also sheds light on the history of dinosaurs and where their remains are more likely to be found. There are areas in Wyoming, Montana, Alberta (in Canada), China, and Africa.
Erickson said with a laugh: “People don't realize there were southern dinosaurs.” There are about a thousand species of dinosaurs, and about forty are identified as “duck-billed.”