A "superduck" dinosaur fossil found in Montana may help scientists determine the link between two groups of dinosaurs that has been eluding them.
The "short-crested" lizard, called the Probrachylophosaurus bergei, lived 80 million years ago and could be the connection that shows how non-crested
dinosaurs developed a crest, the Daily Mail reported.
The lizard fossil has a "short protrusion" on its skull, and was a kind of duck-billed dinosaur that lived during the Cretaceous Period, the U.K. newspaper said. The creature would have been about 30 feet long and weighed more than five tons.
"When everything was cleaned, it revealed this little crest — a tiny little stubby crest on its head — like nothing we’d ever seen,” Elizabeth Freedman Fowler, an adjunct professor at Montana State University and curator of paleontology at the
Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Malta, told The Missoulian.
She explained that the Probrachylophosaurus bergei filled in a missing link for the species of Maiasaura, a duck-billed dinosaur.
"We knew what lived earlier and later,” Fowler told the Missoulian. "Now we’ve found a new species that is filling in that gap."
"It’s a pretty important dinosaur considering the fact that it shows an evolutionary transition," Jack Horner, professor of paleontology at Montana State University, told the newspaper. "You don’t see that too often. Most of the snapshots we get of animals are so separated in time that we only see different species."
The superduck fossil was found in 1981 near the Montana-Canada border and was excavated in 2007 and 2008, the Missoulian said. Field crews from Bozeman's Museum of the Rockies performed the excavation and cleaned the fossil at the museum.
According to the museum's website, it houses one of the world's largest collections of North American dinosaur fossils and has "one of the few paleohistology laboratories in the world."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.