Zuoyunlong

Say it: ZOH-yoon-long

Name means: “Zuoyun County dragon”1

Ate: PlantsBeaked plant-eatersLate Cretaceous

Zuoyunlong was a plant-eating dinosaur that lived in China about 95 million years ago. It walked on two legs and had a beak for snipping leaves and twigs.1 2

Lived

100 to 84 million years ago3

Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Shanxi Province, China1

Food

Plants2

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

cool stuff

Fun facts

Zuoyunlong is known from only two bones: a partial right ilium and the lower end of a right ischium.1

Its name honors paleontologist Huang Weilong, who studied Chinese dinosaurs.1

Zuoyunlong was a basal hadrosauroid, meaning it was an early relative of duck-billed dinosaurs like Edmontosaurus.1

Scientists think Zuoyunlong lived during the Cenomanian stage, about 95 million years ago.1

The back part of its ilium (hip bone) was very short, only half the length of the main body of the bone.1

Zuoyunlong was closely related to Probactrosaurus, another early hadrosauroid from Inner Mongolia.1

AI-made picture of Zuoyunlong — An AI-made picture of how Zuoyunlong might have looked, made by a computer from what scientists know. It is a guess: the real animal may have looked different, and nobody knows its true colours.

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For dino experts

Scientific name: Zuoyunlong
Named by: Wang et al. 20173
Group: Beaked plant-eaters
Family / clade: Hadrosauroidea3
Classification: Ornithischia > Ornithopoda > Iguanodontia3
Age of the rocks: 100 to 84 million years (Cenomanian / Santonian)3
Rock formations: Zhumapu3
Countries: China3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Zuoyunlong was named in 2017 by Wang Runfu and colleagues. The fossils were found before 2015 by a team from the Shanxi Regional Geological Survey in the Zhumapu Formation.1
Still debated: Scientists are not sure exactly how big Zuoyunlong was, because only a few hip bones have been found.1

Where the facts come from

Zuoyunlong (en.wikipedia.org)
PBDB Taxon (paleobiodb.org)
Zuoyunlong in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

Every fact on this page has a number that points to its source. If we got something wrong, sorry, we are dino fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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