Horn-Faced Dinosaur Fossils Discovered in Utah

[n2doc]

Meet Nasutoceratops titusi, a newly described dinosaur that looks like a cross between an overgrown bull and a Dr. Seuss character. The beast’s Latin name means Large-Nosed Horned Face, and it wielded some pretty heavy duty headgear: Large horns, roughly 2.5 feet long, curve forward and extend to the tip of its oversized, beak-like nose.

The dinosaur, described July 17 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is the newest member of the Ceratopsid assemblage – the same crew that includes Triceratops – and suggests that dinosaurs in the American west clustered in distinct communities.


Nasutoceratops titusi in the Late Cretaceous forests of the Kaiparowits Formation. (Raúl Martín)
In 2000, scientists began finding N. titusi fossils in southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Layered and remote, the region’s Kaiparowits Plateau is a treasure chest of fossils from the Late Cretaceous; roughly 75 million years ago, the area belonged to an island land mass called Laramidia that extended from northern Alaska to Mexico. Here, west of paleo-Appalachia, is where Nasutoceratops and its friends roamed, eating vegetation and flaunting their ornamented skulls.

Nasutoceratops is only the second horned dinosaur unearthed in southern Laramidia. Its closest relative is Avaceratops lammersi, a species that lived in the northwest about 2 million years earlier. Together, the two form a group that diverged from the rest of the ceratopsid lineage about 81 million years ago, evolving larger horns and simpler frills than other species. Scientists have debated whether these, and other large dinosaurs, roamed contiguously through North America, or if the giant reptiles could evolve independently and occupy localized communities. With Large-Nosed Horned Face emerging from the southern Utah rocks, the data suggest that at least two pockets of dinosaurs independently coexisted in Laramidia, for more than a million years.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/07/big-nosed-horned-face/

[Shrike47]

1. Somehow they made him look like a friendly moose.

[Vinnie From Indy]

2. Is Mitch McConnel on vacation?

eom

[Scuba]

3. Why did "horned-faced dinosaur" make me think of Louie Gohmert?