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Zalmoxes is a medium-sized robust ornithischian dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Romania, about 70–66 million years ago. Zalmoxes lived on the ancient Hațeg Island of the European archipelago and, like other island-dwelling dinosaurs there, was comparatively small, a possible case of insular dwarfism.
But the taxonomic history (and present) of Zalmoxes is far more complex. Originally described as a species of Rhabdodon, Z. robustus was given its own genus name (and a second species, Z. shqiperorum) in 2003. But in the first half of 2026 Z. shqiperorum was removed from Zalmoxes and placed in the ceratopsian genus Ferenceratops. This came as quite a surprise to many, and while most researchers still accept that Zalmoxes robustus is a rhabdodontid ornithopod, it’s shaken up the scientific conception of what both putative rhabdodontids and basal ceratopsians might look like, so we’ll monitor this to see how it shakes out.
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