According to fossils collected from a bone bed, a team from the Royal Ontario Museum discovered the dinosaur called Wendiceratops pinhornensis that's approximately 20-feet lengthy and weighs higher than a tonne.
It lived about 79 million years back, making it one of the most ancient known members of the family regarding large-bodied horned dinosaurs which includes the famous Triceratops.
“Wendiceratops [ceratopsian] assist us understand their early evolution of skull ornamentation within an iconic group regarding dinosaurs characterised through their horned faces, ” stated David Evans, curator regarding vertebrate palaeontology.
The wide frill regarding Wendiceratops is ringed through numerous curled horns, the nose had a huge, upright horn and it's likely there were horns above the eyes too.
“The number of gnarly frill projections and also horns makes it probably the most striking horned dinosaurs ever discovered, ” he added within a paper published inside the journal PLOS ONE.
Beyond its strange, hook-like frill, Wendiceratops includes a unique horn ornamentation over its nose.
“It indicates the advanced evolutionary growth in between low, rounded kinds of the earliest horned dinosaurs and its particular relatives, ” said Michael Ryan on the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and also co-author of the study.
The locked horns of 2 Wendiceratops could have been utilized in combat between males to get access to territory or females.
The acceptance of Wendiceratops affirms a higher diversity of ceratopsids likely associated with a quick evolutionary radiation within the group.
A full-sized skeleton and show profiling Wendiceratops is now on display at the Royal Ontario Museum within Toronto.
Source:: This atop story is based on materials provided by The Hindu and image credit IBNLive.
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