Corythosaurus
Name means “Helmet lizard”
Corythosaurus was a duck-billed dinosaur with a round crest on its head shaped like half a dinner plate. The crest was hollow and may have helped it make loud calls.
Corythosaurus casuarius was a lambeosaurine hadrosaurid from the Late Campanian of Alberta, known from many complete skeletons, some with skin impressions. Its helmet-like crest enclosed looping nasal passages that may have acted as a resonating chamber for calls.
Life reconstruction of Corythosaurus casuarius.png — Connor Ashbridge · CC BY-SA 4.0
Pictures
Spin it in 3D
3D model description: a 3D model of Corythosaurus shaped from a scientific life reconstruction painting, with the painting's colours and skin texture wrapped around it. It is not a scan of a real fossil.
About this model
This model is shaped from a scientific life reconstruction by Connor Ashbridge: the painting's outline gives the 3D body and the painting itself is its skin. It is sized to the real animal's length (about 8.3 m), so in AR it appears life-size!
It looks best from the side, like the painting it comes from. It is not a fossil scan — museums such as the Smithsonian 3D collection share real fossil scans you can explore.
What might it sound like?
Transcript: Deep, rounded hooting honk, about 3 seconds long
🤔 Nobody knows exactly how dinosaurs sounded
Corythosaurus's crest held twisting air passages, and studies of its braincase suggest it could hear low sounds well, so scientists think it made deep resonant calls. The exact sound is a scientific guess, because voice boxes and soft tissues do not fossilise.
Voice boxes and soft tissue almost never fossilise, so sound reconstructions use clues: body size (bigger animals make lower sounds), the calls of living relatives (crocodiles boom with closed mouths; birds coo and hiss), and hollow structures such as hadrosaur crests that could have worked like a trumpet.
Sound: synthesised by DinoVerse from these scientific ideas (CC0). It is a creative guess, not a recording.
Food and habits
Herbivore
Plant-eater
How it ate
Plucked leaves, twigs and fruit with a narrow beak, then ground them with dental batteries of hundreds of tightly packed cheek teeth.
🔍 How do we know?
- dental batteries with grinding surfaces
- narrow beak suited to selective feeding
- tooth wear
- gut contents and coprolites from related hadrosaurs
It ate…
- Conifer needles and twigs
- Seeds and fruits
- Flowering shrubs
- Ferns
Corythosaurus
…and was eaten by
- Gorgosaurus
- Daspletosaurus
Arrows show energy moving up the food chain: from food to eater.
Watch it call
Quick facts
| 📏 Length | 7.7–9 m (25–30 ft) |
|---|---|
| ↕️ Height | 2.5–3 m (8–10 ft) |
| ⚖️ Weight | 2,800–4,000 kg (6,170–8,820 lb) |
| ⏳ When it lived | 77–75.7 million years ago (Late Cretaceous) |
| 📍 Fossils found | Dinosaur Provincial Park, Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada; Oldman Formation, Alberta, Canada |
| 🔎 Discovered | 1911 by Barnum Brown |
| 🧬 Group | Ornithopods — Ornithischia › Neornithischia › Ornithopoda |
Where scientists disagree, we show a range. Sizes are for adults.
How big was it?
Where and when
- 📍 Dinosaur Provincial Park, Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada (North America)
- 📍 Oldman Formation, Alberta, Canada (North America)
Lived 77–75.7 million years ago
That's about 76 million years before you were born! Humans have only existed for about 0.3 million years.
See it on the big timeline →Did you know?
- 1Corythosaurus had a tall, round crest that looked like a helmet!
- 2Its crest was hollow inside, so it may have honked like a giant trumpet.
- 3Some of its fossils even show the bumpy pattern of its skin.
- 4Some Corythosaurus fossils sank to the bottom of the ocean when the ship carrying them was sunk in 1916!
- CT scans of lambeosaurine skulls, including Corythosaurus, show inner ears suited to low-frequency hearing and enlarged brain regions possibly linked to social behaviour, supporting the idea that crests were used for calling and display.
- In the 1970s Peter Dodson showed that several 'species' of crested hadrosaurs in Alberta were really juveniles, females and males of the same animals at different growth stages.
- Two specimens collected by the Sternberg family were lost in 1916 when the SS Mount Temple, carrying them to the British Museum, was sunk by a German raider during World War I.
- Its crest grew as it aged: juveniles had only a small bump, and the full helmet shape appeared as animals approached adult size.
Myth vs fact
❌ MythCorythosaurus used its crest like a snorkel or air tank to stay underwater.
✅ FactThe crest had no opening at the top and held only a small amount of air, so it could not work as a snorkel. Corythosaurus lived and fed on land.
❌ MythEvery different crest shape was a different species.
✅ FactCrests changed shape as hadrosaurs grew and may have differed between males and females, so many old 'species' turned out to be the same animal.
Mini quiz
1. What does 'Corythosaurus' mean?
2. What happened to some Corythosaurus fossils in 1916?
3. Which predator might have hunted Corythosaurus?
Related animals
Parasaurolophus
OrnithopodLate CretaceousHerbivore
Edmontosaurus
OrnithopodLate CretaceousHerbivore
Maiasaura
OrnithopodLate CretaceousHerbivore
Stegoceras
PachycephalosaurLate CretaceousHerbivore
Sources
Media on this page
- Life reconstruction of Corythosaurus casuarius.png — Connor Ashbridge · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Fern in forest by I. Levitan (1895, N. Novgorod).jpg — Isaac Levitan · Public domain
- Corythosaurus 3D model, shaped from the life reconstruction "Life reconstruction of Corythosaurus casuarius.png" — Connor Ashbridge (artwork); 3D shaping by DinoVerse · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Corythosaurus reconstructed call (synthesised) — DinoVerse (synthesised) · CC0 1.0
- Carnegie Corythosaurus.jpg — James Tiffin Jr. · CC BY-SA 2.0
- CorythosaurCMNSkin.jpg — LittleLazyLass · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Corythosaurus.jpg — Barnum Brown · Public domain
- Corythosaurus AMNH.jpg — Jonathan Chen · CC BY-SA 4.0