New dinosaur species is titanic
Titanoceratops may be oldest known member of triceratops group
By Susan Milius
An oddball fossil skull in an Oklahoma museum may represent a new kind of dinosaur, the earliest giant horned species yet found.
The 1.2-meter-long partial skull, found along with some bones, deserves to be recognized as a species in its own right, says Nick Longrich of Yale University. The specimen was originally found in 1941 in 74-million-year-old rock in northwestern New Mexico. A reconstruction currently glares down at visitors in the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History in Norman, Okla. Until now, paleontologists treated the find as a weirdly huge specimen of the Pentaceratops dinosaurs known from the Southwest region.
This beast probably weighed 6,550 kilograms, rivaling Triceratops and modern-day elephants. The head, one of the biggest of any known land animal, was an estimated 2.6 meters long. In the June Cretaceous Research, Longrich christens it Titanoceratops ouranos. The new species would add another branch of giants to the Triceratops family tree and would mean that giant size evolved some 5 million years earlier than previously thought, he says.