{"id":538754,"date":"2026-06-16T22:21:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T22:21:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/538754\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T22:21:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T22:21:12","slug":"new-duck-billed-dinosaur-unearthed-in-romania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/538754\/","title":{"rendered":"New Duck-Billed Dinosaur Unearthed in Romania"},"content":{"rendered":"

An international team of paleontologists from Romania, Hungary and Italy has identified a new genus and species of herbivorous, duck-billed dinosaur from an incomplete skeleton unearthed in the Ha\u021beg Basin, a bowl-shaped depression in the Carpathians of present-day Romania.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Kryptohadros<\/a><\/p>\n

Kryptohadros kallaiae. Image credit: Tibor Pecsics.<\/p>\n

Kryptohadros kallaiae roamed our planet during the Maastrichtian age of the Cretaceous period, about 70 million years.<\/p>\n

This dinosaur was a type of hadrosauroid<\/a>, which is a group of herbivorous ornithischians that included the famous duck-billed dinosaurs and their close relatives.<\/p>\n

The species\u2019 holotype specimen was found at the vertebrate site of F\u00e2nt\u00e2nele-3 near V\u0103lioara village in the Ha\u021beg Basin, Romania, in continental deposits of the Densu\u0219-Ciula Formation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This area is renowned among paleontologists for its unusual island-dwelling dinosaurs.<\/p>\n

\u201cComplete skeletons that include cranial elements, vertebrae and limb bones are very rare in the Ha\u021beg Basin, and this is especially true for hadrosauroid remains,\u201d said Dr. Attila \u0150si, a paleontologist at the ELTE E\u00f6tv\u00f6s Lor\u00e1nd University.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost sites usually only contain isolated bone elements from this dinosaur group, which, although often lacking defining features, was generally thought to belong to the previously known Telmatosaurus.\u201d<\/p>\n

The skeleton of Kryptohadros kallaiae is partial, comprising a skull, rib fragments, tail vertebrae and a partial hindlimb.<\/p>\n

Yet even this fragmentary material was enough to distinguish the new species from every other known dinosaurs, most importantly from Telmatosaurus transsylvanicus<\/a>, the duck-billed dinosaur with which it had been confused for over a century.<\/p>\n

The discovery shows that at least two closely related duck-billed dinosaurs inhabited the region during the Late Cretaceous.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe similarity between the new species and Telmatosaurus, is quite high, because they are close relatives,\u201d said J\u00e1nos Magyar, a doctoral student at the ELTE E\u00f6tv\u00f6s Lor\u00e1nd University and the Hungarian Natural History Museum.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe differences are mostly visible only in the morphology of the skull elements.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the researchers, Kryptohadros kallaiae, Telmatosaurus transsylvanicus, and Tethyshadros insularis<\/a> from Italy form a newly recognized evolutionary group called Telmatosauridae, an endemic lineage that evolved in the island environments of southeastern Europe.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur phylogenetic analyses reveal particularly close relationships between all currently known Late Cretaceous south-eastern European hadrosauroids (Telmatosaurus, Tethyshadros and Kryptohadros) that belong to a newly recognized small endemic clade, Telmatosauridae,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn addition, these analyses identify several different hadrosauroid evolutionary lineages present within the Late Cretaceous European Archipelago, and suggest that at least six other dispersal events took place between the Albian (113 to 100 million years ago) and the Maastrichtian (72 to 66 million years ago) from Asia towards North America and\/or Europe, besides the arrival of the ancestors of Telmatosauridae before the Campanian (84 to 72 million years ago).\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe absence of certain later-arriving European hadrosauroid lineages from the faunas of the south-eastern European islands supports earlier hypotheses that propose a direct migration route during the latest Cretaceous between Asia and the south-western European islands, circumventing south-eastern Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

The discovery of Kryptohadros kallaiae is described in a paper<\/a> in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.<\/p>\n

_____<\/p>\n

J\u00e1nos Magyar et al. 2026. New early Maastrichtian \u2018duck-billed\u2019 dinosaur from Ha\u021beg Basin (Densu\u0219-Ciula Formation, Romania) documents an endemic clade of non-hadrosaurid hadrosauroids in the south-eastern Late Cretaceous European Archipelago. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 24 (1); doi: 10.1080\/14772019.2025.2607800<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An international team of paleontologists from Romania, Hungary and Italy has identified a new genus and species of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":538755,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[77],"tags":[8098,231393,23429,18,1015,231394,4696,53525,231395,19,17,231396,231397,10676,133,231398,231399,231400,231401,231402],"class_list":["post-538754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-cretaceous","tag-densus-ciula-formation","tag-dinosaur","tag-eire","tag-europe","tag-european-archipelago","tag-fossil","tag-hadrosauroidea","tag-hateg-basin","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kryptohadros","tag-kryptohadros-kallaiae","tag-romania","tag-science","tag-telmatosauridae","tag-telmatosaurus","tag-telmatosaurus-transsylvanicus","tag-tethyshadros","tag-tethyshadros-insularis"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116762122269023202","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/538755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}