page_title: Hadrosauridae
section_title: History of discovery
hierarchical_section_title: Hadrosauridae / History of discovery
caption_attribution_description: View of the right side of an Edmontosaurus annectens mummy.
context_page_description: Hadrosaurids, or duck-billed dinosaurs, are members of the ornithischian family Hadrosauridae. This group is known as the duck-billed dinosaurs for the flat duck-bill appearance of the bones in their snouts. The family, which includes ornithopods such as Edmontosaurus and Parasaurolophus, was a common group of herbivores during the Late Cretaceous Period in what is now Asia, Europe, Antarctica, South America, and North America. Hadrosaurids are descendants of the Upper Jurassic/Lower Cretaceous iguanodontian dinosaurs and had a similar body layout.
  Like other ornithischians, hadrosaurids had a predentary bone and a pubic bone which was positioned backwards in the pelvis. Hadrosauridae is divided into two principal subfamilies: the lambeosaurines, which had hollow cranial crests or tubes; and the saurolophines, identified as hadrosaurines in most pre-2010 works, which lacked hollow cranial crests. Saurolophines tended to be bulkier than lambeosaurines. Lambeosaurines included the aralosaurins, tsintaosaurins, lambeosaurins and parasaurolophins, while saurolophines included the brachylophosaurins, kritosaurins, saurolophins and edmontosaurins.
context_section_description: Hadrosaurids were the first dinosaur family to be identified in North America - the first traces being found in 1855-1856 with the discovery of fossil teeth. Joseph Leidy examined the teeth, and erected the genera Trachodon and Thespesius (others included Troodon, Deinodon, and Palaeoscincus). One species was named Trachodon mirabilis. Ultimately, Trachodon included all sorts of cerapod dinosaurs, including ceratopsids, and is now considered an invalid genus. In 1858, the teeth were associated with Leidy's eponymous Hadrosaurus foulkii, which was named after the fossil hobbyist William Parker Foulke. More and more teeth were found, resulting in even more (now obsolete) genera.
  A very well preserved complete hadrosaurid specimen, AMNH 5060 (Edmontosaurus annectens), was recovered in 1908 by the fossil collector Charles Hazelius Sternberg and his three sons, in Converse County, Wyoming. It was described Henry Osborn in 1912, who dubbed it the "Dinosaur mummy". This specimen's skin was almost completely preserved in the form of impressions.
  Hadrosaur research experienced a surge in the decade of the 2000s, similar to the research of other dinosaurs. In response to this, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Royal Tyrrell Museum collaborated to arrange the International Hadrosaur Symposium, a professional meeting about ongoing hadrosaur research that was held at the latter institution on September 22nd and 23rd in 2011. Over fifty presentations were made at the event, thirty-six of which were later incorporated into a book, titled Hadrosaurs, published in 2015. The volume was brought together primarily by palaeontologists David A. Eberth and David C. Evans, and featured an afterword from John R. Horner, all of whom also contributed to one or more of the studies published therein. The first chapter of the volume was a study by David B. Weishampel about the rate of ornithopod research over history, and the interest in different aspects of it over that history, using the 2004 volume The Dinosauria as the source of data on the amount of works published in each decade. Various periods of high and low activity were found, but the twenty-first century was found to overwhelmingly be the most prolific time, with over two-hundred papers published. The advent of the internet was cited as a likely catalyst for this boom. Hadrosaur research experienced high levels of diversity within the decade, with previously uncommon subjects such as growth, phylogeny, and biogeography experiencing more attention, though the functional morphology of hadrosaurids was found to have declined in study since the Dinosaur Renaissance.
caption: A well-preserved specimen of Edmontosaurus annectens
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