The fossilized bones of a striking new species of dinosaur with a "halo" or frill of bones crowning its head and an impressive "nose horn" have been discovered in southern Alberta, Canada, paleontologists say.
The 79-million-year-old fossils, three adult and one juvenile, are a new species that has been named Wendiceratops pinhornenis, they say.
The name honors famous fossil hunter Wendy Sloboda, who found the bones while walking with her dogs in the southern Alberta badlands just north of Montana in 2010.
Paleontologists spent two entire summers digging into a cliff to unearth the fossils, eventually collecting around 200 bones from four individual dinosaurs.
The adult specimens would have been around 20 feet in length and could have weighed in at more than a ton, the researchers say in their study appearing in PLOS One.
The fossils are giving paleontologists insights into the evolution of the distinctive facial features — horns and skull frills — of these types of dinosaurs, known as ceratopsids.
"The wide frill of Wendiceratops is ringed by numerous curled horns; the nose had a large, upright horn; and it's likely there were horns over the eyes, too," says study co-author David Evans, curator of vertebrate paleontology with the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
"The number of gnarly frill projections and horns makes it one of the most striking horned dinosaurs ever found," he says.
W. pinhornensis, like other ceratopsid dinosaurs, was an herbivore that probably grazed on low-gowing plants, using a parrotlike beak and broad, leaf-shaped teeth, the researchers say.
Male dinosaurs of the newly-identified species may have used their nose horns to fight over access to females or territory, suggests study co-author Michael Ryan, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio.
Alberta has yielded a number of new ceratopsian fossils; last month, paleontologists reported their discovery of Regaliceratops peterhewsi, which they famously nicknamed "Hellboy."
The early evolutionary record of ceratopsids is not well understood, researchers say, because just seven species have been found and classified, all dating from between 90 to 77 million years ago.
Most of the previous finds involved very limited amounts of fossil material, which makes the unearthing of more than 200 bone fragments of Wendiceratops — particularly parts of the skulls — a highly significant find, other researchers say.
"We're learning much more about the ancestry and evolutionary diversification of horned dinosaurs," says Peter Dodson, a professor of anatomy and paleontology at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the Alberta study.
