The Wendiceratops pinhornensis was discovered in southern Alberta in 2010 by Wendy Sloboda, who is described as “one of the best dinosaur hunters in the world”.
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The dinosaur is the latest member of a group that includes Triceratops, and it’s a family that just keeps growing.
The research appears in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.
“We are working on a bone bed that has yet another unbelievable new horned dinosaur in it”, Evans said.
Stay tuned for more, equally strange-looking beasts from the remote past, Evans said.
Wendy Sloboda got a tattoo of the Wendiceratops, which she discovered. [See Photos of the New Species of Horned Dinosaurs from Alberta].
Sloboda has scoured far-flung locales including Argentina, Mongolia, France and Greenland and made her first important fossil finds as a teenager.
She worked for several years at the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller. (She did.) “We’ve always known that we wanted to name a dinosaur after her, but we wanted it to be a really great dinosaur”.
A new dinosaur has been discovered.
Wendiceratops was discovered in the Pinhorn Provincial Grazing Reserve in Alberta, Canada. In June, researchers announced the discovery of Regaliceratops peterhewsi, famously dubbed “Hellboy,” a Triceratops relative that lived about 70 million years ago.
“It had some very tantalizing ornamentation – showed curling of some of the horns off the side of the frill”, Evans recalled.
He also claims that the shapes of the skulls of horned dinosaurs may be related to sexual signaling and head-butting competitions that males of the species participated in, which can be compared to behavior exhibited by Bighorn sheep.
Over the next three years, the team “basically moved half a hillside” containing hundreds of tonnes of rock.
More than 200 Wendiceratops bones were uncovered at a site in southern Alberta, Canada, belonging to at least four individuals – three adults and one juvenile.
According to the paper, Wendiceratops was one of the first dinosaurs in its evolutionary line to feature a large horn on its nose.
Evans said when the dinosaurs lived, the area was a lush coastal plain along an interior seaway similar to modern-day Louisiana.
“Wendiceratops is a truly eye-catching dinosaur”.
They likely died and were buried by monsoonal floods, Evans said.
Life in a herd means Wendy would have been subject to the social pressures of mating displays and holding off rivals, tasks for which horns are well suited. They said it represents the earliest documented tall nose horn in the herbivorous, beaked dinosaurs from the Ceratopsia Period.
“No other dinosaur has the same pattern of curled-over horns like that”, Loewen said.
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“I think that’s unbelievable”.
