Triceratops' new cousin is already the oddball of the family.
This latest horned dinosaur species is named Regaliceratops — literally, "royal horn face" — for the crown-like adornments on the back of its skull. This large "crown," known as a frill, is just one out of a bizarre mix of features that would make Regaliceratops stick out in a family photo. The discovery adds a surprising twist to the evolutionary story of horned dinosaurs, according to a report published in the journal Current Biology.
Regaliceratops made its public debut at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology on June 4, but a man hiking along the Oldman River in Canada first noticed its bones peeking through the side of a cliff about 10 years earlier. He was not a paleontologist himself, but discoverer Peter Hews is now immortalized in the field through the dinosaur's full name, Regaliceratops peterhewsi.
Found embedded in a steep cliff made of very hard rock, Regaliceratops was a challenge to excavate. To make matters more difficult, the waters below were a protected habitat for an endangered species of fish, so it was illegal to let rocks fall in the river.
"All of these things combined led to the nickname 'Hellboy' — because it was such a hellish quarry," lead author Caleb Brown of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology told Tech Times.
The horned dinosaur family has two distinct sides, the Chasmosaurines and the Centrosaurines. Regaliceratops' is a particularly important find because it does not fit neatly into either. Both Regaliceratops and Triceratops are horned dinosaurs of the Chasmosaurine variety. Triceratops and all other dinosaurs in this side of the family are similar in that they have a small horn on the nose and two larger horns over the eyes. However, Regaliceratops has this backwards. It has a large horn on its nose and smaller horns over its eyes.
"So, you have a Chasmosaurine that basically switched sides," says Brown.
Regaliceratops may sound like the lovechild of a Chasmosaurine and a Centrosaurine, but Brown explains that previous findings indicate that this could not possibly be the case.
"The cool thing about this is that although these two groups coexisted for most of their time, the Centrosaurines went extinct about a million or two million years before Regaliceratops lived," he says.
This means that, for some reason, Regaliceratops went down an evolutionary path similar to that taken by the Centrosaurines more than a million years earlier, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution.
So far, researchers only have Regaliceratops' skull to study, as the rest of the skeleton was not preserved. This is fortunate, as the skull is the most informative part of horned dinosaurs, says Brown, but he adds that he and his colleagues will be on the lookout for more Regaliceratops specimens.
