A three-meter-long dinosaur may have swum across a vast ocean

By Michael Marshall

Dinosaurs like Parasaurolophus may have been good swimmers

Daniel Eskridge / Alamy

For the first time in Africa, the fossil remains of a duck-billed dinosaur were found. The discovery suggests that dinosaurs sometimes swam across vast oceans and were more capable in the water than we thought.

“As we can best judge, dinosaurs swam over ocean barriers,” says Nicholas Longrich of the University of Bath in the UK.

Towards the end of the dinosaur era, duck-billed dinosaurs or hadrosaurs were common. They were big animals that mostly ate plants. The bones in their snouts were flattened, giving them a duck-like appearance. …