Posture and Locomotion

Figure 7

This Corythosaurus was mounted in 1920 at the Royal Ontario Museum. At that time paleontologists beleived that hadrosaurs walked in an upright position.

  • Close examination of the skeleton reveals that the head of the femur articulates with the pelvis at the point where two of the bones, the pubis and ilium, join together, which is the point of weakness. This suggests that the body could have been held in an upright position.
  • They were functionally bipedal because the hindlegs are considerably larger than the forelegs where the hind legs probably carried most of the weight.
Figure 8

  • A convincing case was made by Peter Galton (1970) that hadrosaurs held their vertebral column horizontally and their tail stiff and fairly straight.
  • Figure 9

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