Most people know the triceratops, the horned dinosaur that Dr. Alan Grant and his team stumbled across in the fields in a memorable Jurassic Park scene. But what about its fellow ceratopsid cousins? Scientists have now identified a new dinosaur, the xenoceratops, that helps round out the ceratopsid family tree.
The discovery was made by Cleveland Museum of Natural History curator Mark Ryan, who is a specialist in horned dinosaurs and identified a set of fossils stored at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa as a new species, the xenoceratops.
The two-ton herbivore sports a huge frill from the back of its skull that has two large horns protruding. In addition, the xenoceratops also has two horns above its big-browed eyes and a bird-like beak. It is described as having had an "alien horned-face."
"Starting 80 million years ago, the large-bodied horned dinosaurs in North America underwent an evolutionary explosion," said Ryan. "Xenoceratops shows us that even the geologically oldest ceratopsids had massive spikes on their head shields and that their cranial ornamentation would only become more elaborate as new species evolved."
The xenoceratops is believed to have lived 80 million years ago, making it one of the earliest ceratopsids, the family that the triceratops belongs to as well.
"Xenoceratops provides new information on the early evolution of ceratopsids. The early fossil record of ceratopsids remains scant, and this discovery highlights just how much more there is to learn about the origin of this diverse group," David Evans from the Royal Ontario Museum and University of Toronto said.
The only real pieces of xenoceratops the scientists have at the moment are pieces of skull fragments from different dinosaurs, but scientists hope to identify more xenoceratops fossils in the future in order to better understand its behavior.
Read the study at the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.
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