A ‘spectacular’ dinosaur dome heads for the Smithsonian
A remarkably well-preserved dinosaur fossil has arrived at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of National History. According to the institution’s announcement, the almost complete skull of a Pachycephalosaurus is scheduled to make its public debut Dec. 22 at FossiLab, the museum’s sample preparation lab.
“This skull is by far the most spectacular specimen of this type of dinosaur that we have at the museum,” said Matthew Carrano, paleontologist and curator of the Dinosauria Museum. “We almost never see the animal’s face, teeth or other parts of the head, because they have usually become detached.”
Pachycephalosaurus is one of the most recognizable herbivorous dinosaurs of the Late Cretaceous period and shared the ancient landscape with other titans like Tyrannosaurus rex And Triceratops. With an extremely dense, rounded mound of bone at the top of their skull, Pachycephalosaurus living up to its scientific name which translates to “thick-headed lizard”. But despite his behavior depicted in numerous books and films, including his appearances in the Jurassic Park frankness – paleontologists are not sure whether the dinosaur actually used this anatomical feature to headbutt rivals or threaten predators.
The largely intact skull is a relatively recent discovery. In 2024, paleontologists unearthed the specimen in South Dakota, in the Hell Creek Formation. The region is famous for its diversity of fossils spanning the 1.5 million years before the Cretaceous-Paleogene asteroid extinction.
Despite the diversity of species preserved at Hell Creek, Pachycephalosaurus Bones represent less than one percent of all fossils discovered so far. Paleontologists believe this could be due to the dinosaur’s size. Although adults were probably over 15 feet long, they remained much smaller than those of their bulkier contemporaries like Edmontosaurus And Triceratops. However, Pachycephalosaurus it may also be that they simply occupied a small subsection of the overall ecosystem.
The Smithsonian specimen features almost its entire skull, including 32 distinct cranial bones. Among these, several are merged to form the dome of the same name. Many teeth also remain in the skull, as well as replacement teeth in its jaws. Given its size, paleontologists believe that the dinosaur had not yet reached adulthood. In the near future, Carrano and his colleagues will take CT scans of the skull to compare it with other examples, and possibly learn more about how the species developed over its lifetime.
“We can understand the shape and size of the brain and the position of each bone, which is really hard to do when the outside basically looks like a bowling ball,” he explained.
The specimen is not the first Pachycephalosaurus at the National Museum of Natural History. The institute also houses the holotype (named) dome-shaped fossil of the species, first scientifically described in 1931.
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