A new study has uncovered the remains of a 160-million-year-old plant eating dinosaur in China’s Gobi desert that is changing what scientists think about triceratops. Unlike what is traditional thought of as triceratops, the newly discovered creature is spaniel-sized and walks on its hind legs.
The new dinosaur has a unique ornamental texture on its skull, similar to the skull texture that triceratops are famous for. However, the new fossil doesn’t have what might be the triceratops’ most distinguishing feature: horns.
Previously, other fossils have been discovered with similar anatomy to the triceratops, such as the Yinlong downsi, and these creatures also sported textured skulls but no horns. “It looks like Yinlong downsi, but much larger,” said Fenglu Han, the study’s lead author and postdoctoral student at the School of Earth Sciences at the China University of Geosciences.
The newly identified species has been named Hualianceratops wucaiwanensis, which means “textured skull, horned face” and refers to the area in which the fossil was discovered. Its discovery is leading scientists to believe there was far more diversity in the horned dinosaur family than previously thought.
The Hualianceratops wucaiwanensis is far older than the triceratops, however. The triceratops lived during the Late Cretaceous period, which is about 90 million years later than the new discovery.
“Given the pattern of relationships revealed by the new animal and new analysis, the paper also suggests that there are many more, and more varied, species of these small …horned dinosaurs during the initial evolution of this group,” said Caleb Brown, a paleobiolgist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology. Brown isn’t the only one excited about the study, as the discovery of the new dinosaur marks major progress in our understanding of the creatures.