A team of scientists from the Royal Tyrrel Museum of Paleontology in Canada has just discovered a new species of dinosaur with a few weird features. The dinosaur has been given the nickname “Hellboy” by the team due to its large nose horn and the difficulty in separating its bones from rock. The new fossil is similar in many ways to that of a Triceratops. Part of what makes this Hellboy dinosaur noticeably different is that its pair of eye horns is tiny in comparison to the Triceratops’, and all three horns are also shaped quite differently.
New dinosaur has shield-like plating on the back of its skull.
Perhaps the most notable novelty about this dinosaur is the armor on the back of its head. It consists of a spike in the center, with pentagonal plates fanning outwards. The result is a crown-like appearance, which contributed to the formal name given to the Hellboy dinosaur, Regaliceratops peterhewsi. The “peterhewsi” part is a reference to the man who discovered the fossil, Peter Hews.
Hellboy dinosaur’s bones actually found ten years ago.
Hews found the almost fully intact skull of this new dinosaur protruding from a cliff along the Oldman River in Alberta around ten years ago. Researchers knew immediately that the find was an important one, since horned dinosaurs had never been found before in that region before. Only after scientists got to separate the bones from rock did they realize what Hews had stumbled upon.
Discovery has significant scientific implications.
After some analysis, scientists found that the new specimen belongs to a group of horned dinosaurs called Chasmosaurines. The Triceratops also belongs to this group. Interestingly, though, the Hellboy dinosaur has features more in line with those of the Centrosaurines, another group of horned dinosaurs that had already gone extinct. This makes it an example of evolutionary convergence, the only one ever found in horned dinosaurs. It also suggests that there are very likely other undiscovered horned dinosaurs out there. Scientists will now be looking out for some of these undiscovered species, perhaps in hopes of painting a richer picture of dinosaur evolution.
Hellboy Dinosaur With Strange Horns and Crown Discovered
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