USA: baby triceratops dinosaur found


This video is called Triceratops Tribute.

From the Helena Independent Record in the USA:

Tiny dino a huge discovery

By MARTIN J. KIDSTON IR Features Writer

The badlands revealed another scientific prize this month to a Montana State University undergraduate student who found the skull and frill of a baby triceratops on a dig near Jordan.

The find is so rare it may only be the third of its kind ever made.

Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, announced the rare discovery Thursday and believes it will help paleontologists better understand dinosaur development.

“It was a baby,” Horner said. “It really was less than a year old.

The orbital horns are only about three or four inches long.”

The skull was found at a dig near Jordan by Sonja Scarff, an undergraduate student at Montana State University. Scarff was working on a field crew under Horner’s direction.

Ancestors of Triceratops, Psittacosaurus: here.

Albertaceratops: here.

3 thoughts on “USA: baby triceratops dinosaur found

  1. Museum IDs New Species of Dinosaur

    The Associated Press

    March 03, 2007

    It was sort of the grandfather or great-uncle of the really diverse horned dinosaurs that came after it.

    A new dinosaur species was a plant-eater with yard-long horns over its eyebrows, suggesting an evolutionary middle step between older dinosaurs with even larger horns and the small-horned creatures that followed, experts said.

    The dinosaur’s horns, thick as a human arm, are like those of triceratops _ which came 10 million years later. However, this animal belonged to a subfamily that usually had bony nubbins a few inches long above their eyes.

    Michael Ryan, curator of vertebrate paleontology for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, published the discovery in this month’s Journal of Paleontology. He dug up the fossil six years ago in southern Alberta, Canada, while a graduate student for the University of Calgary.

    ‘Unquestionably, it’s an important find,’ said Peter Dodson, a University of Pennsylvania paleontologist. ‘It was sort of the grandfather or great-uncle of the really diverse horned dinosaurs that came after it.’

    Ryan named the new dinosaur Albertaceratops nesmoi, after the region and Cecil Nesmo, a rancher near Manyberries, Alberta, who has helped fossil hunters.

    The creature was about 20 feet long and lived 78 million years ago.

    The oldest known horned dinosaur in North America is called Zuniceratops. It lived 12 million years before Ryan’s find, and also had large horns.

    That makes the newly found creature an intermediate between older forms with large horns and later small-horned relatives, said State of Utah paleontologist Jim Kirkland, who with Douglas Wolfe identified Zuniceratops in New Mexico in 1998. He predicted then that something like Ryan’s find would turn up.

    ‘Lo and behold, evolutionary theory actually works,’ he said.

    ___

    On the Net:

    Cleveland Museum: http://www.cmnh.org/

    Southern Alberta Dinosaur Research: http://www.dinoresearch.ca/

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  2. 09.03.2007 / 15:08 Triceratops’ “granddaddy” discovered in Canada
    NEW YORK. March 9. KAZINFORM – Its forehead sprouted horns as large as human arms, and its skull was frilled with spikes the size of sharks’ teeth.
    Even to the scientists who discovered this new species of dinosaur, the fearsome-looking creature was a bizarre sight.

    But its weird appearance is what helped experts peg the dino as a missing link, a never-before-seen member from the family tree of Triceratops.

    Dubbed Albertaceratops nesmoi, the 78-million-year-old dinosaur was unearthed in 2001 by paleontologist Michel Ryan and a colleague in the badlands of southern Alberta, Canada.

    Ryan was initially puzzled by the animal’s skull, he said, because it had the familiar giant horns of Triceratops but the ornate frill of another kind of ceratops called a centrosaur.

    “We knew that we had something special that we had never seen before,” said Ryan, now a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, in a statement.

    “It meant that while Triceratops had giant horns, some centrosaurs did, too.”

    This odd combination of features suggests that Albertaceratops is the most primitive of the centrosaurs, Ryan explained, dating back to before centrosaurs split with the family that includes Triceratops, Kazinform refers to National Geographic News.

    “Unquestionably, it’s an important find,” Peter Dodson, a University of Pennsylvania paleontologist, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

    “It was sort of the grandfather or great-uncle of the really diverse horned dinosaurs that came after it.”

    http://www.inform.kz/showarticle.php?lang=eng&id=149159

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  3. Pingback: New dinosaur species discovery in Canadian museum | Dear Kitty. Some blog

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