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Ceratopsia or Ceratopia (/ ˌ s ɛr ə ˈ t ɒ p s i ə / or / ˌ s ɛr ə ˈ t oʊ p i ə /; Greek: "horned faces") is a group of herbivorous, beaked dinosaurs that thrived in what are now North America, Asia and Europe, during the Cretaceous Period, although ancestral forms lived earlier, in the Late Jurassic of Asia.
Cross section of a typical theropod dinosaur tooth in side view. All dinosaur teeth possess the same tissue types but can differ in their appearance. Various major groups of dinosaurs have been examined through histology, these include the carnivorous theropods and herbivorous groups such as the sauropods, hadrosaurs and ceratopsians.
As a hadrosaurid, Parasaurolophus was a large bipedal and quadrupedal herbivore, eating plants with a sophisticated skull that permitted a grinding motion analogous to chewing. Its teeth were continually being replaced and were packed into dental batteries containing hundreds of teeth, but only a relative handful of which were in use at any time.
Like other ornithischians, hadrosaurids had a predentary bone and a pubic bone which was positioned backwards in the pelvis. Unlike more primitive iguanodonts, the teeth of hadrosaurids are stacked into complex structures known as dental batteries, which acted as effective grinding surfaces.
Lips protect teeth from drying out and they help preserve the enamel. Since dinosaur teeth are often found with well-preserved enamel, Reisz concluded that dinosaurs likely had a protective set of ...
It is usually not possible to identify tooth marks on bone made by small predatory dinosaurs due to similarities in the denticles on their teeth. [8] However, there are exceptions, like an ornithomimid caudal vertebra that has tooth drag marks attributed to Saurornitholestes and a partial Troodon skeleton with preserved puncture marks. [8]
The lokiceratops had at least 12 smaller horns coming from its head, and perhaps even 14, whereas another similar looking dinosaur, the medusaceratops, only had 10, he said.
The teeth, however, are now known to belong to a theropod. Arthur Cruickshank (1975) was the first to show that Vulcanodon was indeed a sauropod, arguing that the fifth metatarsal bone was equally long as the remaining metatarsals, a condition seen in other sauropods but not in prosauropods. [ 19 ]