# Parasaurolophus walkeri

> A duck-billed dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Alberta, famous for a long, backward-curving hollow crest. Air from the nose ran through tubes inside the crest, which may have worked as a resonating chamber for deep calls.

- Classification: Dinosauria (clade) > Ornithischia (clade) > Ornithopoda (clade) > Hadrosauridae (family) > Lambeosaurinae (subfamily) > Parasaurolophus (genus) > Parasaurolophus walkeri (species)
- Length: 7.5–10 m
- Hip height: 2.2–2.8 m
- Mass: 2.6 t
- Age: 76.5–75.8 million years ago (Late Cretaceous)
- Fossils found in: Dinosaur Park Formation (Alberta); Canada
- Diet: herbivore
- Described: William A. Parks, 1922
- In films: Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Jurassic Park III (2001), Jurassic World (2015), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), Jurassic World Dominion (2022), Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)

Canonical page: https://dinodex.club/dinosaurs/parasaurolophus-walkeri
Last updated: 2026-09-27

## Overview

Parasaurolophus walkeri lived in western North America in the Late Cretaceous (Campanian). William Parks named it in 1922 from a skull and partial skeleton (ROM 768) collected in the Dinosaur Park Formation along the Red Deer River, Alberta. Two other species, P. tubicen and P. cyrtocristatus, come from New Mexico and Utah.

It was a large hadrosaur that could walk on two or four legs. Its crest was formed by the nasal and premaxillary bones, and the nasal passages looped through it. David Weishampel (1981) modelled the crest as a resonating tube; for the type specimen the lowest frequency comes out at about 48 Hz, a very deep sound.

A juvenile from Utah (RAM 14000), about 2.5 m long and probably less than a year old, shows that the crest started as a low bump and began growing at less than a quarter of adult skull size, earlier than in other crested hadrosaurs (Farke et al. 2013). Small patches of scaly skin are preserved with it.

## Name meaning

"Near crested lizard", from Greek para ("beside, near"), sauros ("lizard") and lophos ("crest"), after Saurolophus; walkeri honours Sir Byron Edmund Walker (Parks 1922).

## Sources

1. (2026). Paleobiology Database: Parasaurolophus occurrences. The Paleobiology Database (paleobiodb.org), data service 1.2, accessed 2026-09-23. https://paleobiodb.org/data1.2/occs/list.txt?base_name=Parasaurolophus&show=coords,paleoloc,strat,loc,ref&pgm=gplates
2. (2026). Wikipedia: Parasaurolophus. Wikipedia (English), accessed 2026-09-23. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasaurolophus
3. Eberth, D. A., Evans, D. C., Ramezani, J., Kamo, S. L., Brown, C. M., Currie, P. J. & Braman, D. R. (2023). Calibrating geologic strata, dinosaurs, and other fossils at Dinosaur Provincial Park (Alberta, Canada) using a new CA-ID-TIMS U-Pb geochronology. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1139/cjes-2023-0037
4. Farke, A. A., Chok, D. J., Herrero, A., Scolieri, B. & Werning, S. (2013). Ontogeny in the tube-crested dinosaur Parasaurolophus (Hadrosauridae) and heterochrony in hadrosaurids. PeerJ 1: e182. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.182
5. Parks, W. A. (1922). Parasaurolophus walkeri, a new genus and species of crested trachodont dinosaur. University of Toronto Studies, Geology Series 13: 1-32.
6. Paul, G. S. (2016). The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs (2nd edition). Princeton University Press.
7. Weishampel, D. B. (1981). Acoustic analyses of potential vocalization in lambeosaurine dinosaurs (Reptilia: Ornithischia). Paleobiology 7: 252-261. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0094837300004036

---

Cite as: "Parasaurolophus walkeri". DinoDex. https://dinodex.club/dinosaurs/parasaurolophus-walkeri (updated 2026-09-27).