duck-billed dinosaur

noun

variants or less commonly duckbill dinosaur

: any of various herbivorous dinosaurs (family Hadrosauridae) of the Late Cretaceous having the jaw elongated into a snout that resembles a beak : hadrosaur

Fossils of a duck-billed dinosaur have turned up in Antarctica, recalling a time 66 million years ago when the now-frozen continent bore forests and a bountiful ecosystem.

—Richard Monastersky

Example Sentences

Recent Examples on the Web

In the 1980s, Bruce Stinchcomb, a paleontology student studying Gilmore and Stewart's, analyzed the old bones and identified them as belonging to a hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur, per CNN. —Elizabeth Gamillo, Smithsonian Magazine, 2 Dec. 2021

Word History

First Known Use

1913, in the meaning defined above