🦆Ornithopods

Bird-footed plant-eaters

Ornithischia › Neornithischia › Ornithopoda

Ornithopods were plant-eating dinosaurs with beaks. Some, like Iguanodon, had a spiky thumb. Others, the duck-billed dinosaurs, had hundreds of teeth for munching plants.

Ornithopods ("bird feet") are ornithischian dinosaurs that ranged from small, fast runners to 12-metre hadrosaurs, appearing by the Middle Jurassic and lasting to the end of the Cretaceous. They combined a horny beak with batteries of cheek teeth and a flexible jaw that let them grind tough plants, one of the most advanced chewing systems of any reptile. Iguanodon, one of the first dinosaurs ever named (1825), carried a conical thumb spike. Hadrosaurs such as Edmontosaurus and Parasaurolophus were among the most common Late Cretaceous plant-eaters; the hollow crests of some species probably worked as resonating chambers for calls and as visual displays.