ShareThisBy GREG LAVINE
Monday, November 13, 2006
Its four prominent horns lend a new Utah dinosaur an intimidating air, but the rhinoceros-sized beast probably spent large parts of its day peacefully grazing.
This 20-plus horned creature, which can easily hold its own in the spike department against its famed younger Triceratops cousin, is the latest major discovery by scientists to be announced from the badlands of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Jim Kirkland, state paleontologist, described the 80-million-year-old creature for the first time Friday during a paleontology meeting in Ottawa, Canada. The official name of the dinosaur, dubbed "Last Chance Ceratopsian" for the location where it was found, will be unveiled sometime next year.
"It's particularly gratifying to find something like this," said Kirkland, who predicted such a find more than a decade ago.
A member of the ceratopsid family of dinos, the creature was probably not using its horn-covered head to charge the occasional passing Tyrannosaurus rex. Instead, Kirkland said, the horns were more likely used for sparring with others in its horned species to attract mates.
Kirkland, who has studied other horned dinosaurs from the Southwest United States, theorized the horns above the brow in this family of dinosaurs likely appeared before the nose horns on later species. He predicted an ancestral dinosaur would be found to prove his theory.
That evidence, in the form of Last Chance's 6-foot-long horned head, cropped up in 2002.
Don DeBlieux, a Utah Geological Survey fossil preparator, was hiking through Grand Staircase as part of a general survey of the monument when he noticed orange-colored fossil bits on the ground, a sign the pieces were coming out of a nearby outcrop.
DeBlieux put his backpack down on a ledge, and there he happened to find a golf-ball-sized fossil piece poking through the sandstone. During his first few visits to work the site, DeBlieux had trouble visualizing the orientation of the skull in the stone.
"I couldn't make heads or tails of it," he said. "Then there was that eureka moment."
DeBlieux finally realized the left half of the skull was buried in the rock. After several field seasons, the crew never found the rest of the beast.
Kirkland speculates the head of this dinosaur rolled into a streambed. Over the years, silt covered half of the skull, but the right half eroded away before it could be buried.
Since both halves of these skulls would have been identical, scientists were able to reconstruct what the entire skull would have looked like.
To date, no other members of the Cretaceous-era species has been found nearby. It is unclear whether this creature lived a solitary life or traveled in herds, though later family members have been found in groups, Kirkland said.
DeBlieux has spent about 400 hours preparing the skull, and he hopes he is half done. The skull will eventually be displayed at the Utah Museum of Natural History.
