The discovery of a new species of horned dinosaur with an unusually large nose was announced at the Natural History Museum of Utah on July 17.
The 15 foot 2.5 ton dinosaur was discovered in the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in 2006 and was named Nasutoceratops titusi.
“The name means big-nosed horned face, which sounds like an insult, but it really is descriptive of this animal in a lot of ways,” said Scott Sampson, who led the study that found the fossils.
Titusi refers to Alan Titus, the paleontologist who is in charge of research at the monument. He started the search for dinosaurs at the monument when he was hired in 2000.
Nasuceratops belongs to a group of dinosaurs that typically have lots of ornamentation such as hooks, horns and spikes on their heads.
“Nasutoceratops is different. It has a relatively simple frill, not very ornate, but instead it has invested all the energy and ornamentation into these two large horns, which are relatively speaking, the longest for any horned dinosaur. They come all the way to the front of the snout,” Sampson said.
There is also a tiny horn on the nose. Sampson said scientists are confident that horned dinosaurs used their horns to attract and compete for mates, just as horned animals today.
The Nasuceratops’ nose is large for a horned dinosaur, but scientists believe it did not improve the creature’s sense of smell. The front of the dinosaur’s nose is large, but the sense of smell is typically located in the rear for dinosaurs.
“It may have something to do with controlling brain temperature, brain cooling. It may have something to do with this animal showing off. There could be soft tissues that were attached that could be lubbed like an elephant seal and that to make noise. We really don’t know,” Sampson said.
Scientists only found the skull, neck, front part of the back and the front legs of the dinosaur.
“We can be very confident about what that back end looked like though because we have many other horned dinosaurs with which to compare it,” Sampson said.
The process of excavating fossils is lengthy, but Titus said it took a year just to get the Nasuceratops out of the ground.
“It’s not like you find it and rip it out of the ground and run. These things are extremely brittle. They’ve been attacked by roots and freeze thawed. They’re filled with thousands of fractures. Every one of these fractures had to be stabilized with glue both in the field and back at the lab. So if you’re not careful in the process of collecting these things you will destroy it,” Titus said in an interview.
After a specimen is airlifted to a lab it may take another two of three years to stabilize it before it is ready to be researched.
This dinosaur represents a new genus as well as a species. It is from new group of dinosaurs that are less ornate than others that lived farther north. Sampson said this difference is significant because in Africa there are only five or six species over 100 kilograms and in the area where the new dinosaur lived, which is much smaller the Africa, there were over 20 species over 1,000 kilograms.
Scientists are not sure why the land could support so many large animals. Sampson said it is possible that there was more food available because of the high temperature of the earth which led to more plant life. Another possible reason is that the animals did not eat as much because they were cold blooded and do not have to create heat to maintain body heat.
The dinosaur lived around 76 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period when the earth was very warm and had no polar ice caps. The monument would have been a swamp similar to the Louisiana Bayou, Sampson said.
Titus said that paleontologists work to learn about the environments and ecosystems of the creature they discover rather than just the creatures themselves.
“This was a time when there was no polar ice caps no major glacial features and you’re talking about a hot house world. This could be the direction our planet’s heading in. We don’t know. There may be lessons for to learn about biogeography and extinction,” Titus said.