Question 1

How do you say Tsintaosaurus?

Accepted Answer

Tsintaosaurus is pronounced ching-DOW-sore-us. The tricky part is the beginning: the 'Ts' is silent and 'Tsintao' sounds like 'ching-DOW,' which is the old Western spelling of the Chinese city Qingdao. Break it into three chunks: ching, DOW, and sore-us, stress the middle syllable, and you will sound like a paleontologist.

Question 2

What does Tsintaosaurus mean?

Accepted Answer

Tsintaosaurus means 'lizard from Tsintao,' which is the old romanized spelling of Qingdao, a city in Shandong Province, China, near where the fossils were found. The 'saurus' ending comes from the Ancient Greek word for lizard and is used in hundreds of dinosaur names. The full species name, Tsintaosaurus spinorhinus, adds 'spine-nosed,' referring to the weird spike on top of its skull.

Question 3

Did Tsintaosaurus really have a unicorn horn?

Accepted Answer

It looked that way in early drawings, but it was not actually a horn. The spike on Tsintaosaurus's head was a hollow bony projection that scientists now believe formed the base of a larger soft-tissue crest, similar to those seen in related dinosaurs like Parasaurolophus. For decades scientists even debated whether the spike was real or just a fossilized bone that had shifted out of place, but modern studies confirmed it was genuinely there. The crest was probably more like a sound amplifier than anything resembling a unicorn horn.

Question 4

How big was Tsintaosaurus?

Accepted Answer

Tsintaosaurus was about 27 feet long, which is roughly the length of two full-size SUVs parked bumper to bumper. It weighed around 2.5 tonnes, about the same as a large pickup truck loaded with heavy cargo. That makes it a medium-to-large hadrosaur, not the biggest dinosaur of its era but still an impressively massive animal by any measure.

Question 5

What did Tsintaosaurus eat?

Accepted Answer

Tsintaosaurus was a herbivore and ate plants. It had a wide flat beak for cropping leaves and shoots, and its jaws were packed with hundreds of tightly packed teeth arranged in rows, constantly replacing old worn ones with new ones. This tooth battery made it extraordinarily efficient at grinding up tough vegetation like ferns, conifers, and flowering plants that were becoming more common in the Late Cretaceous period.

Question 6

When did Tsintaosaurus live?

Accepted Answer

Tsintaosaurus lived approximately 72.2 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period. This was a time when dinosaurs were at their peak diversity worldwide and flowering plants were rapidly spreading across the planet. Tsintaosaurus shared its world with other large dinosaurs in what is now China, in an environment of warm floodplains and river deltas.

Question 7

Where was Tsintaosaurus found?

Accepted Answer

Tsintaosaurus fossils were found in Shandong Province in eastern China, in rocks belonging to the Wangshi Formation. The fossils were discovered near the region of Qingdao, which is a major port city on China's eastern coast. Chinese paleontologist C. C. Young described the animal in 1958, making it one of the most important dinosaur discoveries from China in the 20th century.

Question 8

Was Tsintaosaurus related to T. rex?

Accepted Answer

No, Tsintaosaurus was not closely related to T. rex at all. T. rex was a theropod, a meat-eating bipedal dinosaur, while Tsintaosaurus was a hadrosaur, a plant-eating ornithischian dinosaur. They are about as distantly related as two dinosaurs can be. Tsintaosaurus's closest relatives were crested hadrosaurs like Parasaurolophus and Lambeosaurus, which were equally peaceful plant-eaters.

Question 9

Could Tsintaosaurus walk on two legs?

Accepted Answer

Tsintaosaurus usually walked on all four legs, keeping its heavy body close to the ground while it browsed vegetation. However, it could rear up onto its two powerful hind legs when it needed to reach higher food sources or when it spotted a predator and needed to run. Scientists believe hadrosaurs like Tsintaosaurus were actually fairly fast runners on two legs when they were motivated by fear.

Question 10

Did Tsintaosaurus live in groups?

Accepted Answer

Scientists strongly believe Tsintaosaurus lived in herds, just like most other hadrosaurs. Evidence from hadrosaur fossil sites around the world shows bones of many individuals preserved together, suggesting these animals traveled in groups. Living in a herd provided protection against predators, and Tsintaosaurus's crest may have helped individuals communicate with the rest of the group using loud resonant calls.

Question 11

How was Tsintaosaurus discovered?

Accepted Answer

Tsintaosaurus was described by the prominent Chinese paleontologist C. C. Young in 1958, based on fossils recovered from the Wangshi Formation in Shandong Province. Young was one of China's most important early paleontologists and discovered or described many significant Chinese dinosaurs. The discovery was a major moment for Chinese paleontology at a time when the country was building its own scientific institutions independently.

Question 12

Is Tsintaosaurus the same as a duck-billed dinosaur?

Accepted Answer

Yes, Tsintaosaurus is a hadrosaur, and hadrosaurs are commonly called duck-billed dinosaurs because of their wide flat beaks that look somewhat like a duck's bill. Tsintaosaurus specifically belongs to the lambeosaurine hadrosaurs, the subgroup that had hollow crests on their heads, which sets them apart from the flat-headed hadrosaurs. So Tsintaosaurus was a crested duck-billed dinosaur, which is a pretty spectacular combination.

Question 13

What noise did Tsintaosaurus make?

Accepted Answer

Scientists believe Tsintaosaurus could produce loud, resonant calls using its hollow head crest, which may have been connected to its nasal passages. By pushing air through the crest, the animal could amplify sounds into deep booming calls that would carry across open floodplains. Researchers have used computer modeling on the similar crests of Parasaurolophus to recreate what those calls might have sounded like, and the result is something between a foghorn and a trombone.

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