New Horned Dinosaur in Alberta: Offers Horn Learnings

A horned dinosaur, a new species, has been discovered based on fossils from a bone bed in southern Alberta, Canada. It is called Wendiceratops pinhornensis. Researchers from the Royal Ontario Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History recently reported their findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Renowned fossil hunter Wendy Sloboda pointed out the area where the bones of the new dinosaur were recovered, and the dinosaur is named for Sloboda, according to a release.

The dinosaur was--as they tended to be--a hefty customer, measuring about 20 feet long and weighing about a ton. It lived about 79 million years ago, and was one of the oldest known members of the family that includes Triceratops, the Ceratopsidae. More than 200 bones representing at least four individuals helped describe Wendiceratops.

In their report, scientists including Dr. Michael Ryan at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History note that the dinosaur was an herbivore and ate low-lying plants with a parrot-like beak. Its most distinctive features are hook-like horns that lean forward along a shield-like frill cropping from the back of its skull; and a horn on its nose.

Dr. David Evans, Temerty chair and curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, and co-author of the study said, according to a release, "Wendiceratops helps us understand the early evolution of skull ornamentation in an iconic group of dinosaurs characterized by their horned faces. The wide frill of Wendiceratops is ringed by numerous curled horns, the nose had a large, upright horn, and it's likely there were horns over the eyes too. The number of gnarly frill projections and horns makes it one of the most striking horned dinosaurs ever found."

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