The mystery of what Tsintaosaurus actually looked like goes back to fossils from the Late Cretaceous of China that paleontologist Yang Zhongjian (also known as C.C. Young) described in 1958. In his reconstruction, Yang figured a tubular spike made of the nasal bones jutting from the dinosaur’s skull. But this ornament was so unlike that of other crested hadrosaurs that other researchers questioned whether the spike was a real feature. Paleontologist Philippe Taquet, for one, suggested that the Tsintaosaurus spike might simply be a nasal bone that was wrested out of place by distortion after the hadrosaur’s death.

But the skull that Yang described wasn’t the only one. Another partial skull, previously studied by Eric Buffetaut and Haiyan Tong, had skull