Dino card No. 0839 of 2,015

Hypacrosaurus

Say it: hy-PACK-ro-SORE-us

Name means: “near the highest lizard”1

Ate: PlantsDuck-billsLate Cretaceous

Hypacrosaurus was a big duck-billed dinosaur with a tall, hollow crest on its head. It lived in herds and ate plants, using its wide beak to crop leaves and branches.1

Lived

84 to 66 million years ago3

Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Alberta, Canada, and Montana, USA1 2

Food

Plants1

Length

up to 9.1 m1

estimated maximum length

Weight

up to 4 tonnes1

Height

up to 4 m1

feeding range from ground to about 4 m

Artist's life restoration of Hypacrosaurus — How Hypacrosaurus may have looked, by Connor Ashbridge. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Scientists still argue about colours and details.

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

Hypacrosaurus had very tall spines on its backbone, making its back look high and ridged.1

Its hollow crest was like Corythosaurus's but smaller and more pointed, and it may have been used to make sounds.1

Scientists found nests, eggs, and babies of Hypacrosaurus, giving us a rare look at how these dinosaurs raised their young.1

Hypacrosaurus could walk on two legs or four, and it could reach plants up to 4 metres (13 feet) high.1

Its teeth were constantly replaced, and it had hundreds of teeth packed together for grinding tough plants.1

The species H. stebingeri is known from the largest collection of baby skeletons of any single hadrosaur species.1

Myth buster

Myth: Some people think Hypacrosaurus was a sea creature because of its crest.

Truth: It was a land dinosaur that lived near rivers and plains, not in the sea.1

For dino experts

Scientific name: Hypacrosaurus
Named by: Brown 19133
Group: Duck-bills
Family / clade: Hadrosauridae3
Classification: Ornithischia > Ornithopoda > Iguanodontia > Hadrosauridae3
Age of the rocks: 84 to 66 million years (Campanian to Maastrichtian)3
Rock formations: Two Medicine, Horseshoe Canyon, Oldman3
Countries: Canada, USA3
Fossil records: 37 in the Paleobiology Database3
Also known as: Cheneosaurus (older names now counted as the same animal)3
Discovery: Barnum Brown collected the first fossils in 1910 along the Red Deer River in Alberta, Canada, and named Hypacrosaurus in 1913.1
Still debated: Scientists debate whether H. stebingeri is a separate species or just a younger version of H. altispinus.1

Where the facts come from

Hypacrosaurus (en.wikipedia.org)
Hypacrosaurus | Natural History Museum (nhm.ac.uk)
Hypacrosaurus in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

Every fact on this page has a number that points to its source. If we got something wrong, sorry, we are dino fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@dinowiki.app and we will fix it.