Three-metre-long dinosaur may have swum across a wide ocean

By Michael Marshall

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

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

Duck-billed dinosaurs or hadrosaurs were common towards the end of the dinosaur era. They were large dinosaurs that mostly ate plants. The bones in their snouts were flattened, giving them a …