ROM 768

This is where my ROM 768 shrine is gonna go.

ROM 768 is the holotype specimen of Parasaurolophus walkeri and is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. It's the nicest parasaurolophus specimen around, and the one with the craziest spinal injury too.

I need to babygirlify this page...

ROM 768 feat. my hand

I've known this guy for pretty much my whole life. As a kid I'd go to the museum and gawk at its awesomeness, and every time I return I always make time to stop by and take a photo with it. Even though it's not a complete skeleton, doesn't stand on its own nor does it have an anthropomorphized name (especially when on the other side of the hall is Gordo the Barosaurus, that's stiff competition!) it's just so cool to me.

Parasaurolophus walkeri was discovered when this specimen was dug up in Alberta in 1922. People got creative when thinking about the tube-shaped crest on its head, hypothesizing its uses. Maybe it carried a fleshy sail, maybe it was a salt gland, maybe it was a snorkel or air store that helped the animal go underwater, maybe it fought with the crests like a modern ungulate's horns, maybe it even helped the dinosaur breathe fire onto its opponents.

These days, the consensus is that the hollow crest was used as a resonating chamber that would help to animal honk and make other curious foghorn-ish noises. The critter was estimated to live some 70-odd million years ago in North America. There are three species in the Parasaurolophus genus, the two others (p. cyrtocristatus and p. tubicen) being discovered after P. walkeri and both having shorter, curvier crests.

In 2020, a study was performed to take a closer gander at the ROM specimen and highlight all of the things that were wrong with it, including a bunch of broken bones, messed up teeth, fractured ribs, and most obviously the giant divot in its back. The paper concluded that some kind of physical trauma must've happened to the individual in its life, like a tree falling onto it, but it managed to recover and didn't appear to die because of those injuries. That's pretty impressive!

You can read the paper here!