Zalmoxes

What it was like

Zalmoxes was a plant-eating ornithopod that walked mainly on two legs. It had ridged cheek teeth suited to grinding tough plants, and a beak at the front of the jaws for cropping them. Zalmoxes grew to between 2.5 and 3 meters (8 to 10 feet) long, smaller than many of its ornithopod relatives found elsewhere in the world.

Its world

Zalmoxes lived from about 72 to 66 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous, on an island in the Tethys sea, in what is now Romania, with related remains also reported from Austria. Alongside it lived other animals adapted to island life, including the small sauropod Magyarosaurus, the duck-billed Telmatosaurus, and the armored Struthiosaurus, all of which were smaller than their mainland relatives.

How it was found

Weishampel and colleagues named Zalmoxes in 2003. Thirty-eight fossil finds are known today, making Zalmoxes one of the more common dinosaurs known from this part of Cretaceous Europe. Its remains, along with those of the animals living alongside it, have helped paleontologists understand how island life shaped the size of the dinosaurs living there. Because so many specimens have been recovered, Zalmoxes has become one of the better studied examples of dwarfism among dinosaurs.