Orthomerus
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Orthomerus Temporal range: Late Cretaceous, Maastrichtian |
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Sauropsida |
| Superorder: | Dinosauria |
| Order: | Ornithischia |
| Suborder: | Ornithopoda |
| Infraorder: | Iguanodontia |
| Superfamily: | Hadrosauroidea |
| Family: | Hadrosauridae |
| Genus: |
Orthomerus Seeley, 1883 |
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Orthomerus (meaning "straight femur") is a genus of duckbill dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of The Netherlands and Belgium. It is today an obscure genus, but in the past was conflated with the much better known Telmatosaurus.
The type species Orthomerus dolloi was in 1883 named by the well-known British paleontologist Harry Govier Seeley. The genus name is derived from the Greek ὀρθός (orthos), "straight", and μηρός (meros), "thigh". The specific name honours the French/Belgian paleontologist Louis Dollo. However, species names are now written as lower-case, so today the species is known as Orthomerus dolloi.
The type specimen, formed by the syntypes BMNH 42954-57, was probably found in the chalkstone quarries of the Sint-Pietersberg near the city of Maastricht, The Netherlands. It mainly consists of a partial juvenile skeleton. Not surprisingly these remains are from the Maastricht Formation of the late Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous, about 66 million years old. The type bones include the straight left and right femora that moved Seeley to give it its name. A left tibia and a metatarsal also discovered in the collection of Jacob Gijsbertus Samuël van Breda acquired by the British Museum of Natural History in 1871, were referred by him to the species. The leg bones are only about half the size of those belonging to the then largely unknown North American and Asian duckbills, with the femur 50 cm (20 in) long. Other more fragmentary hadrosaurid remains have been found, some of them in The Netherlands, where the species is sometimes presented as a rare "Dutch dinosaur", others in Belgium where in 1882 Dollo excavated two hadrosaurid vertebrae near Zichen, a Belgian border village in Belgian Limburg. It is hard to establish whether they belonged to the same species and not all of them have been explicitly referred to Orthomerus dolloi. Later Belgian finds included a left third metatarsal, NHMM 1996001 discovered by J.H. Kuypers near Eben Emael, where also a larger right third metatarsal was collected, NHMM RD 241, and a right maxillary tooth, NHMM 1999012, found by E. Croimans. Some phalanges and a left ulna have been reported from private collections, lacking an inventory number.
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