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Orthomerus (meaning "straight femur") is a genus of duckbill dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of The Netherlands and possibly Ukraine. It is today an obscure genus, but in the past was conflated with the much better known Telmatosaurus

History

Orthomerus was named by the well-known British paleontologist Harry Govier Seeley for a partial juvenile skeleton from Maastricht, Limburg, the Netherlands. Not surprisingly these remains are from the Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous. The bones include tail vertebrae and a partial right leg, including the straight femur that moved Seeley to give it its name.^[1] The leg bones are only about half the size of those belonging to the then largely unknown North American and Asian duckbills, with the femur 50 cm long (19 in).^[1]

A second species, O. weberi (also spelled weberae), was first described by Anatoly Nikolaenvich Riabinin in 1945 for hindlimb elements from an unnamed Maastrichtian-age formation in the Crimea of what is now Ukraine (then a part of the Soviet Union).^[2] What is sometimes listed as a third species, O. transsylvanicus, is actually the type species of Telmatosaurus, which Alfred Sherwood Romer referred to Orthomerus in his review of reptiles.^[3] This assignment has not been accepted.^[4][5]

The two species, and by extension the genus, have been regarded as fragmentary, non-distinctive, and dubious hadrosaurids,^[4][5] and have fallen out of use. It is mostly of interest in documenting the range of hadrosaurids in Europe.

Paleobiology

As a hadrosaurid, Orthomerus would have been a bipedal/quadrupedal herbivore, eating plants with a set of ever-replacing teeth placed in jaw bones with limited mobility that provided grinding action.^[5]

References

External links

• Orthomerus in The Dinosaur Encyclopaedia at Dino Russ's Lair.

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