Sauropod Beaks: Camarasaurus

Publication Info:

Transcript:

Giacomo Gobbo, et al. The beak of Camarasaurus: inferring the perioral soft tissues of fossil archosaurs using the rostral neurovascular system
ARPHA Preprints, doi:10.3897/arphapreprints.e216404 (23 Sep 2026), Submitted to Swiss Journal of Palaeontology

Did the giant long necked dinosaurs known as sauropods also have beaks? New research is giving paleontologists some hints! These massive plant eating dinosaurs may have had more in common with birds than a lot of people think

Episode 350

Notes:

Do you think sauropods could have really looked like this? I Okay, that that was goofy. But the idea of beaked sauropods has been going around for a while, probably a couple decades. And to be fair, it's not the kind of thing you'd necessarily know if you don't closely follow dinosaur news. Even if that idea's been going around for a while, there hasn't really been any great solid evidence for a fancy facial fingernail on a sauropod, at least until now. When most of us think of beaks, we obviously think of birds. That's not surprising, but birds aren't the only reptile that has a beak. Turtles do, too. And turtles and birds are pretty distantly related. We've known for a long time that there obviously are beaked dinosaurs, like the duck-billed hadrosaurs and ceratopsians, like triceratops, definitely have beaks. But it still feels weird to picture a beak on a sauropod, the giant long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs that towered above most other animals at the time. Well, researchers just took a really close look at the facial features of Camarasaurus, being a 50-plus-foot-long Jurassic Bone Wars dinosaur from Colorado, and compared those structures to lipped, lipless, and beaked reptiles using PCA, or principal component analysis, and found that Camarasaurus falls pretty firmly in with birds, indicating that it had a beak, or at least a beak-like structure on its face covering its teeth. And I know it may seem weird to some of you for it to have a beak and teeth, but at least in other groups of dinosaurs, that's not all that rare. And it also looks like there's a good chance that beaks were present on other sauropods and their close sauropodomorph relatives. Given, they're probably a little more subtle than an 80-foot toucan, but hopefully we'll actually get some fossil evidence for some of this. That said, keratin does not fossilize that well. So, meh. As usual, if you want more information, here's the source.