Re-evaluation of Wulagasaurus indicates Basal Hadrosaurine dinosaurs originated in Asia

Several hundred disarticulated bones have been recovered from a large dinosaur quarry of the Upper Cretaceous Yuliangzi Formation at the base of the Wulaga outcrop of Heilongjiang Province near the Sino-Russian boundary. Most of them are tentatively assigned to the derived lambeosaurine Sahaliyania elunchunorum, and a small number of them were referred to the hadrosaurine Wulagasaurus dongi. Researchers from Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, American Museum of Natural History, and Geological Museum of Heilongjiang Province, re-described Wulagasaurus dongi based on both original specimens and some recently recovered materials, and found Wulagasaurus shares strong morphological similarities with the North American taxa Brachylophosaurus and Maiasaura, forming a monophyletic basal clade of hadrosaurines. It is likely that this basal hadrosaurine clade originated in Asia and subsequently dispersed to North America.

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