Scientists have revealed a new species of horned dinosaurs with bizarre looking features, which they have nicknamed “Hellboy.”
Scientists have described that those bones, which were found sticking out of a cliff along the Oldman River in southeastern Alberta, Canada arour 10 years ago, belonged to a nearly intact skull of a very unusual horned dinosaur-a close relative of the familiar Triceratops that had been unknown to science until now.
Dr. Caleb Brown of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology said that it was not until the specimen was being slowly prepared from the rocks in the laboratory that the full anatomy was uncovered, and the bizarre suite of characters revealed. Once it was prepared it was an unexpected new species.
The uniqueness of this specimen was so obvious that you could tell it was a new species from 100 meters away.
What made this new horned dinosaur distinctive was the size and shape of its facial horns and the shield-like frill at the back of the skull. This new species is similar in many respects to Triceratops, except that its nose horn is taller and the two horns over its eyes are “almost comically small.” But the new dinosaur’s most distinctive feature is that frill, including what Brown describes as a halo of large, pentagonal plates radiating outward, as well as a central spike. “The combined result looks like a crown,” he says.
Brown and study co-author Donald Henderson named the new dinosaur Regaliceratops peterhewsi, a reference to its crown-like frill and to the man who first found and reported it to the museum. Despite the formal name, the scientists say they’ve taken to calling this dinosaur by the nickname “Hellboy.”
Brown said that the new species was a Chasmosaurine, but it has ornamentation more similar to Centrosaurines. Taken together, he says, that makes this the first example of evolutionary convergence in horned dinosaurs, meaning that these two groups independently evolved similar features.
The findings are published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.
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