Dutch Dinosaurs that weren't

Just a short digression before returning to our scheduled programming. Writing about the Dutch Dinosaur  put me in mind of some newspaper stories about `dinosaurs` in the Netherlands. Because all too often they take the word dinosaur to mean "prehistoric creature".

It's a whopper! (image via Wikipedia, user FunkMonk)

Perhaps the most egregious example is this headline in the on-line publication Dutch Daily News:

Giant dinosaur bone found in the Netherlands

The Dutch Dinosaur

The Netherlands is not known as dinosaur country, and with good reason. For most of the Mesozoic the area that is now the Netherlands was covered in water. But sometimes a dinosaur died and ended up in the ocean, probably it fell in a river that flowed into the sea. Or maybe it was walking on the beach when it died.

It's a duck-billed dinosaur

Because such remains are so rare in the Netherlands all of bones would probably fit into a single display, if they were all in one place. They are unfortunately not all in the same place, but the NHHM in Maastricht has a relatively large number of them.