When you think of giant dinosaurs, you usually picture long-necked sauropods. But not all giants were sauropods. Shantungosaurus was a hadrosaur - a duck-billed plant-eater - and it grew to truly enormous size. About 50 feet long, around 15 tons. The biggest hadrosaur ever known.
It probably moved between two- and four-legged walking, depending on what it was doing. Standing on two legs let it reach higher leaves; dropping onto all fours was more comfortable for long walks across the plains it lived on.
Its mouth was a chewing machine. Like other hadrosaurs, Shantungosaurus had layers of teeth stacked together in “dental batteries” - so when the top teeth wore down, fresh ones beneath rose up to replace them. A single mouth could hold over 1,500 teeth at once.
