Hadrosauroidea
Hadrosauroidea is a clade or superfamily of ornithischian dinosaurs that includes the "duck-billed" dinosaurs, or Hadrosauridae, and all dinosaurs more closely related to them than to Iguanodon. Their remains have been recovered in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. Many primitive hadrosauroids, such as the Asian Probactrosaurus and Altirhinus, have traditionally been included in a paraphyletic "Iguanodontidae". With cladistic analysis, the traditional Iguanodontidae has been largely disbanded, and probably includes only Iguanodon and perhaps its closest relatives.

Uncredited · 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
- HadrosauriformesPBDB
- Diet
- herbivorePBDB, for Ornithopoda
- Life habit
- ground dwelling, gregariousPBDB, for Ornithischia
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Ornithischia
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Ornithischia
Time the record covers
At least 96 million years on record.
The record covers at least 168.2 Mya to 72.2 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 174.7 Mya to 61.66 Mya.
1,941 occurrences of Hadrosauroidea 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
1,941 occurrences- Middle Jurassicunder 1%
- Early Cretaceous3%
- Late Cretaceous97%
- Paleoceneunder 1%
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
252 formations
- Dinosaur Park Formation · Belly River Group158
- Hell Creek Formation · Montana Group100
- Kirtland Formation100
- Fruitland/Kirtland Formation96
- Two Medicine Formation · Montana Group69
- Cerro del Pueblo Formation · Difunta Group69
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Hadrosauroidea has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 228 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 122 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Hadrosauroidea and its relatives
Late CretaceousWhere Hadrosauroidea and its relatives were recorded in the Late Cretaceous.
Found in the same rock
880 taxa- Hadrosauridae119 sites
- Ceratopsidae71 sites
- Myledaphus bipartitus68 sites
- Trionychidae68 sites
- Baenidae64 sites
- Scapherpeton tectum62 sites
- Teleostei57 sites
- Anura56 sites
- Chelydridae55 sites
- Opisthotriton kayi55 sites
- Lepisosteus occidentalis53 sites
- Theropoda51 sites
- Multituberculata49 sites
- Paronychodon45 sites
- Champsosaurus44 sites
- Crocodylia44 sites
- Saurornitholestes langstoni43 sites
- Hadrosaurinae42 sites
- Tyrannosauridae42 sites
- Coriops amnicolus40 sites
- Adocus39 sites
- Paralbula casei39 sites
- Aves36 sites
- Belonostomus longirostris35 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 1,731 sites for Hadrosauroidea, and this reads 240 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
694 references- Paleontological survey, resource assessment, and mitigation plan for the Bisti-Star Lake Area, northwestern New Mexico115
- Hadrosaurian dinosaurs of North America108
- Dinozavri severnoi Yevrazii: Novye dannye o sostave kompleksov, ekologii i paleobiogeografii [Dinosaurs of northern Eurasia: new data about assemblages, ecology, and paleobiogeography]80
- Stratigraphic distribution of hadrosaurids in the Upper Cretaceous Fruitland, Kirtland, and Ojo Alamo formations, San Juan Basin, New Mexico61
- The hadrosaurian record from Mexico50
- Diversity of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs from Mexico44
- Vertebrate biostratigraphy of the Hell Creek Formation in southwestern North Dakota and northwestern South Dakota32
- The hadrosaurid record in the Maastrichtian of the eastern Tremp Syncline (Northern Spain)30
- Quarries of Dinosaur Provincial Park30
- Hadrosaurian Dinosaurs of Big Bend National Park, Brewster County, Texas30
- Fossil Vertebrate Collections24
- The paleogeographic and stratigraphic distribution of ceratopsids (Ornithischia) in the Upper Judith River Group of western Canada22
Each of the 1,941 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. 682 further references are not listed. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Hadrosauroidea
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- not stated by the source
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
No 3D scan was found. Smithsonian Open Access, MorphoSource and Sketchfab were all searched.
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 itHadrosauriformes through timeFormations of the Late CretaceousThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Huene 1954)