Amurosaurus - the crested, duck-billed dinosaur

Amurosaurus riabinini lived on Earth in the late Cretaceous, around 72-66 million years ago.

It was a facultative bipedal dinosaur – sometimes walking on its hind legs, sometimes on four - and herbivorous. It belonged to the Hadrosauridae family - a group of duck-billed dinosaurs.

Fossil bones of adult Amurosaurus are extremely rare to find, but the small amount of material that has been found shows that Amurosaurus was about 12 meters long.

The first Amurosaurus fossils were discovered in 1902 on the Amur river, however it took 10 years for the fossils to be fully excavated and examined.

In 1925, the first “Hadrosauridae dinosaur from the Amur region” was described by scientists. It was named Mandschurosaurus amurensis, but this name didn’t stick.

Very soon the species description was criticized by American and European scientists, and rejected. The Manchurosaurus skeleton had been assembled from many fragmented bones, and was supplemented by plaster casts.

After thorough checks, scientists concluded that the bones of the skeleton actually belonged to different dinosaurs, and the Manchurosaurus was labelled a chimera - a creature containing the cells of different species.

In the mid-1980s, considerable efforts of paleontologist Yuri Leonidovich Bolotsky, helped to resume excavations on the Amur River banks near Blagoveshchensk were resumed. And in 1991, Bolotsky together with Sergei Mikhailovich Kurzanov, described a new species of dinosaur - the Amurosaurus riabinini .

The name derives from the Amur River, and the Greek word "Sauros" (lizard). The species was named "riabinini" after the late Russian paleontologist Anatoly Nikolayevich Ryabinin, who at the beginning of the 20th century described the first fossil findings in this region.

3D scanning was performed by A. Akhtamzyan.