A dinosaur with frills and horn… definitely it should look pretty. In case you are looking for a pretty dinosaur, the Agathaumas is the one that you should learn about. In this article titled 14 interesting Agathaumas facts, we are going to learn about this majestic dinosaur that once roamed our earth.
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At a Glance
Name: Agathaumas
Lived: 70-65 million years ago.
Status: Extinct.
Diet: Plants.
Locomotion: Quadrupedal.
Size: 30 feet
Weight: 6.6 short tons.
Special Characteristics: Frills and horns
Discovered in: 1872 by Edward Drinker Cope – a Paleontologist.
Place of Discovery: Southern Wyoming.
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Interesting Agathaumas Facts: 1-14
1. The term Agathaumas is derived from Greek which means a forest dweller. So, this dinosaur lived in forests.
2. On the prehistoric timeline, this dinosaur lived during the Late Cretaceous some 70 million years ago to 60 million years ago.
3. Its home was Northern America’s woodlands. Well, this dinosaur was a vegetarian by diet and lived on plants.
4. From snout to tail tip, this dinosaur was about 30 feet in length.
5. Agathaumas was pretty heavy and weighed about 5.9 long tons, which is about 6.6 short tons.
6. At the time it was discovered, it held the title of being the largest land animal of its time.
7. The distinguishing features of the dinosaur included its beautiful frills and horns.
8. When the Agathaumas was discovered back in the 1872, science had no clue that such a dinosaur could have existed. As a result, its discovery created a sensation.
9. The fossil remains of Agathaumas were actually discovered by Henry Martin Bannister and Fielding Bradford Meek in southern Wyoming. These two men were actually hired by Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden’s Geological Survey of the Territories.
10. The two men, once they found the fossil, informed the same to Edward Drinker Cope – a famous paleontologist. Cope visited the same area where Bannister and Meek discovered the remains and rediscovered the same thing.
11. What Cope found during his rediscovery is that bones were preserved by clay and sand sediments and along with the bones, there were fossils of leaves and sticks too. This led Cope to claim that the dinosaur dwelled in heavily forested area.
12. Out of excitement, Cope named the dinosaur as Agathaumas sylvestris, which translates into English as marvelous forest-dweller. It was Cope who considered the Agathaumas to be the largest land animal of its time.
13. Of course Cope was not right because several years after the discovery of Agathaumas, the gigantic sauropod was discovered.
14. Cope even considered the Agathaumas as a hadrosaur but later Othniel C. Marsh described Triceraptos and Agathaumas was later reassigned as Triceraptos.
Image Credit: Charles R. Knight