Bactrosaurus
Bactrosaurus is a genus of herbivorous hadrosauroid dinosaur that lived in Asia during the Late Cretaceous, from about 96 to 85 million years ago. The position Bactrosaurus occupies in the Cretaceous makes it one of the earliest known hadrosauroids, and although it is not known from a full skeleton, Bactrosaurus is one of the best known of these early hadrosauroids, making its discovery a significant finding.

Gary Todd · CC0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- HadrosauroideaPBDB
- Diet
- herbivorePBDB, for Ornithopoda
- Life habit
- ground dwelling, gregariousPBDB, for Ornithischia
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Ornithischia
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Ornithischia
- Length
- 6 mWikidata
Time the record covers
At most 35 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 100.5 Mya and 66 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
8 occurrences of Bactrosaurus on record, most of them in the Late Cretaceous. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
8 occurrences- Late Cretaceous100%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
4 formations
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The named rock units Bactrosaurus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Bactrosaurus and its relatives
Late CretaceousWhere Bactrosaurus and its relatives were recorded in the Late Cretaceous.
Found in the same rock
39 taxa- Ornithomimidae3 sites
- Archaeornithomimus asiaticus2 sites
- Ceratopsia2 sites
- Crocodylia2 sites
- Dinosauria2 sites
- Hadrosauridae2 sites
- Hadrosauroidea2 sites
- Ornithischia2 sites
- Sauropoda2 sites
- Testudinata2 sites
- Testudines2 sites
- Theropoda2 sites
- Trionychidae2 sites
- Velociraptor mongoliensis2 sites
- Abelisauridae1 site
- Adocidae1 site
- Alectrosaurus1 site
- Azhdarchidae1 site
- Bivalvia1 site
- Carnosauria1 site
- Dermatemydidae1 site
- Gobihadros mongoliensis1 site
- Jaxartosaurus aralensis1 site
- Lindholmemydidae1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 7 sites for Bactrosaurus, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
7 references- New Bactrosaurus (Dinosauria: Hadrosauroidea) material from Iren Dabasu (Inner Mongolia, P. R. China)2
- Report on the Japan-Mongolia Joint Paleontological Expedition to the Gobi desert, 19951
- Cretaceous fossil localities and a list of fossils collected by the Hayashibara Museum of Natural Sciences and Mongolian Paleontological Center Joint Paleontological Expedition (JMJPE) from 1993 through 19981
- Exploration in Inner Mongolia: a preliminary account of the 1959 field work of the Sino-Soviet Paleontological Expedition (SSPE)1
- The first record of dinosaurian remains from Shansi1
- O nakhodke shlemonosnykh form Dinosauria verkhnemelovykh otlozheniyakh yuzhnogo Kazakhstana [The discovery of crested forms of Upper Cretaceous dinosaurs in southern Kazakhstan]1
- On the dinosaurian fauna of the Iren Dabasu Formation1
Each of the 8 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Each entry links to the Paleobiology Database's own record for the work.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Bactrosaurus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Gary Todd
- Licence
- CC0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Bactrosaurus was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itHadrosauroidea through timeFormations of the Late CretaceousThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Gilmore 1933