Tom Dudgeon

Cellular-level preservation of cutaneous spikes in an Early Cretaceous iguanodontian dinosaur - Nature Ecology & Evolution A juvenile iguanodontian from the Lower Cretaceous of China preserves both spikes and scales in its skin that are different from integumentary structures in either non-avian dinosaurs or extant squama...

Huang, J., Wu, W., Mao, L. et al. Cellular-level preservation of cutaneous spikes in an Early Cretaceous iguanodontian dinosaur. Nat Ecol Evol (2026). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Lambeosaurine crests! New work compares internal nasal anatomy of adult Corythosaurus & Lambeosaurus vs juveniles & Hypacrosaurus. Strong genus-level differences, but surprisingly little variation between Corythosaurus species.
Dudgeon et al.:
anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Putting the finishing touches on the @romtoronto.bsky.social shark workshop! Tomorrow we'll be diving into shark evolution and diversity, from the earliest jawed fish, to Megalodon and the mako. #FossilFriday

Very special #FossilFriday, pleased to announced that we have a new paper out on reconstructing the ecosystem of Dry Mesa Quarry in the Morrison Formation

We used modern ecological techniques to quantity and model the ecosystem

Feel sorry for the baby Sauropods 😞 🦕🦕

Sergey Krasovskiy +Pedro Salas

Lastly, our results emphasize the importance of performing complete adductor muscle reconstructions when running FEAs, and analyses that simplify muscle vectors to single points will possibly miss key data on functional performance. [11/11]

Size mediated resource partitioning is common in modern systems, suggesting that although hadrosaurids, ceratopsids, and ankylosaurians were specialized for different plants, within-group partitioning was subtle and ecological signals cannot be found, apart from size. [10/11]

Our results have important implications:
Resource partitioning between hadrosaurids was size mediated, where similarly sized animals had similar potential for food processing. Larger hadrosaurines had stronger bites than lambeosaurines, and likely had a wider diet breadth. [9/11]

This difference in stress distribution is likely a product of extreme cranial anatomy in Corythosaurus, where the lambeosaurine cranial crest resulted in a change to cranial biomechanics. Further testing of other lambeosaurines is underway to explore this possibility. [8/11]

Curiously, our analysis also reveals that Gryposaurus and Corythosaurus skulls dissipated stress very differently from each other. Gryposaurus had the typical tetrapod stress distribution, but Corythosaurus differed in experiencing very little stress in the snout. [7/11]

These differences in muscle size and efficiency mean similarly sized Gryposaurus and Corythosaurus had similar bite forces. However, Gryposaurus could attain much larger skull sizes than Corythosaurus, meaning adults had higher bite forces and could eat tougher plants. [6/11]

Our analyses reveal biologically relevant differences in the arrangement of the jaw muscles in these animals, where Gryposaurus had proportionately larger jaw muscles than Corythosaurus, but those of Corythosaurus had better leverage and could impart a greater force. [5/11]

Here, we sought out to test whether there are differences in feeding mechanics between the hadrosaurine Gryposaurus, and the coexisting lambeosaurine Corythosaurus from the DPF using Finite Element Analysis. [4/11]

Hadrosaurids are particularly interesting when discussing adaptations for feeding because of their high diversity, complex feeding system, and the frequent co-occurrence of multiple hadrosaurid species within an ecosystem. [3/11]

The DPF is unusual in the large number of herbivores that coexisted, and is commonly explained by resource partitioning. Evidence for resource partitioning between major groups has frequently been found, but evidence within groups, like hadrosaurids, has been subtle. [2/11]

Disparate feeding mechanics between two hadrosaurid dinosaurs support the potential for resource partitioning | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences The Dinosaur Park Formation (DPF) of western Canada is well known for its diverse fossil assemblage, preserving over a dozen species of large-bodied herbivorous dinosaurs. The high density of large herbivores has raised questions of how these animals were ...

I’m thrilled to present the latest work from my PhD!

David Evans and I evaluated feeding mechanics in two hadrosaurids from the Dinosaur Park Fm, and the differences were quite exciting. A thread [1/11]
doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

After an incredibly long gestation period, I have a new paper out reviewing all the data and evidence we have on the pterosaurian uropatagium. Full link to the paper is in the blogpost linked below:

archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2025/09/16/t...

Extreme armour in the world’s oldest ankylosaur Nature - The ankylosaurian dinosaur Spicomellus afer possessed a tail weapon and uniquely elaborate dermal armour.

If you don't have access to Nature, but would like to read our paper on the new specimen of #Spicomellus, you can read it online at this link with no subscription: rdcu.be/eCJK3

This wild new instrument brings a dinosaur back to life A new instrument called the Dinosaur Choir uses CT scans and 3D modeling to recreate actual the sounds of a Corythosaurus.

Ever wonder what dinosaurs might have sounded like? Courtney Brown and Cezary Gajewski developed Dinosaur Choir, a mix of palaeo and music that turns hadrosaurs into instruments. It was a blast to consult, this opens new doors for palaeo reconstructions...

www.fastcompany.com/91291997/din...

A while back we posted a fairly low res. 3D model of a complete skull of the Early Cretaceous therizinosaurus Beipaiosaurus from Liaoning with proto-feathers. sketchfab.com/3d-models/be... Fun to play with. I'm curious if it is printable. @paleontologizing.bsky.social @utahpaleo-ufop.bsky.social

Oh groovy, our paper on the hindlimb biomechanics of the Triassic dinosauriform Lagosuchus is out! A quick thread for now. We uCT-scanned most of the existing skeletal material for this important outgroup to Dinosauria. We sorted through the elements and chose the best ones to make a 3D model from.

Figure showing diverse datasets analysed with SPROUT, including a skink skeleton, aardvark skull, human heart, concrete block, and foraminifera.

New paper! For all of you working with 3d scans (e.g. micro-CT, MRI), check out SPROUT, a rapid open-source tool for generating segmented and parcellated data, meaning your scans are separated into the individual elements without any manual labelling or training. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks Ali!

Clarification: Hadrosaurus must be in Hadrosaurinae by strict clade definition, but here we mean in the traditionally conceived clade composition

We also hope that our dataset and multivariate comparisons may help identify isolated jaws and teeth, providing a new potential avenue for identifying microsite material to a finer resolution. [14/14]

With these analyses, we hope future studies will amend character states following our recommendations, and individual and ontogenetic variation will be better incorporated into character coding to construct more accurate phylogenies. [13/14]

Among these 5 problematic taxa, perhaps the most phylogenetically significant was Hadrosaurus, which was found to most likely to pertain to Hadrosaurinae with very high probability (0.996). [12/14]

Lastly, we were curious what impact these results would have on historically problematic iguanodontians, so we used our multivariate analyses to predict the phylogenetic placement of Hadrosaurus, Eotrachodon, ‘Trachodon’ cantabergiensis, Claosaurus, and Yamatosaurus. [11/14]

Our analysis came with some unexpected observations, most notably the presence of secondary ridges and rounded mammillations on the teeth of early diverging hadrosaurines like Brachylophosaurus and Maiasaura, features classically thought of as lambeosaurine. [10/14]

Secondary ridges and rounded denticles often co-occurred together in the same taxa, and are often present in lambeosaurines and absent in hadrosaurines. These characters may therefore be most useful when applied together. [9/14]

Next, we used multivariate statistics to evaluate how these characters delineate phylogenetic groups when used together. We found that they are accurate overall, suggesting that with modification they can be used reliably. [8/14]