The new dinosaur seems quite menacing, yet only eats plants.
There’s exciting news from the world of paleontology as something completely unique has been literally – unearthed. Fossil hunters have uncovered a new dinosaur in Canada named Wendiceratops, after Wendy Sloboda, the paleontologist and hunter who discovered it.
It really seems that the creators of “Jurassic World” really have nothing on Mother Nature and the diligent bunch of scientist, or paleontologists, who always working to dig up whatever hidden mysteries she’s left for us.
It appears that this dinosaur is much, much cooler than the Indominus Rex that they genetically engineered on the big screen. After all, what could be more amazing than a dinosaur with a crown of horns, and three other, bigger horns on its forehead and nose?
A piece of the skull of the newly discovered dinosaur was spotted in a picture by already renowned fossil hunter Wendy Sloboda. She quickly tracked the GPS coordinates, retrieved the fragment, and then showed to two other scientists, Michael Ryan and David Evans, her colleagues at the Southern Alberta Dinosaur Research Project.
When the two saw the bone fragment, they just jumped into a car and drove directly to the place where the skull had been found. All this happened in 2010.
Five long years after the discovery and the two above researchers have just recently published what they have learned in this period of studying the 200 pieces of bone. That’s four whole individual dinosaurs that were uncovered by a team of just five people jack-hammering a rock until they reached the bones.
The dinosaur is believed to be a more distant relative of the Triceratops, having lived approximately 79 million years ago. Measuring about 20 feet and weighing in at about a ton, the dinosaur is quite unlike most others, even different from its cousin mentioned above. Its crown of horns is extremely intricate, and Evans said it is a “most striking” since it’s the earliest example of all the horned dinosaurs. Despite these horns, the dinosaur was definitely an herbivore, Evans and Ryan say, and used the horns in battles over mating, or in defense against predators.
The most interesting of its horns is its protruding nasal horn, as no other example of an earlier form of nasal horn had been uncovered. Palenontologists are now looking at how the horn evolved from the Wendiceratops to the Triceratops.
Wendy Sloboda, one of few women fossil hunters in the world, chose to celebrate having a dinosaur with her name by tattooing his face on a very special region of her body she had reserved especially for this occasion.
Image source: turner.com