- Science
- Laelaps
“Large-Nosed Horned Face” Nasutoceratops Debuts
For over a year and a half, a mystery dinosaur has been hanging on the trophy wall of the Natural History Museum of Utah. The nameless Cretaceous herbivore isn’t quite like the neighboring horned dinosaurs arrayed in the display’s evolutionary rank and file. The deep-snouted dinosaur has a U-shaped set of long, curved brow horns and small, scalloped ornaments decorating the perforated frill – flashy headgear distinct from the short brow-horned, spiky-frilled look of the dinosaur’s close cousins Centrosaurus and Styracosaurus. Today, this bizarre 75 million year old dinosaur finally gets a name.
Dubbed Nasutoceratops titusi, the “large-nosed horned face” is described by paleontologist Scott Sampson and colleagues in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. (The dinosaur’s species name, titusi,