Some animals are quite happy with one horn but their ancient relatives obviously weren't: new dinosaur, the inhabitant of the lost continent of Laramidia, had 15 horns. But that's is just one of the remarkable findings from Utah.
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The bigger of the two new dinosaurs, with a skull 2.3 meters (since we are in Utah, that's about 7 feet) long, is Utahceratops gettyi. The first part of the name combines the state of origin with ceratops, Greek for "horned face." The second part of the name honours Mike Getty, palaeontology collections manager at the Utah Museum of Natural History and the discoverer of this animal.
In addition to a large horn over the nose, Utahceratops has short and blunt eye horns that project strongly to the side rather than upward, much more like the horns of modern bison than those of Triceratops or other relatives of that time. Maybe you'll get a better picture is we say that it looks like a giant rhino with a ridiculously big head.
Second of the new species is Kosmoceratops richardsoni (say that fast, five times!). Here, the first part of the name refers to cosmos, Latin for "ornate," and ceratops, you already know what that mean. The latter part of the name honours Scott Richardson, the volunteer who discovered two skulls of this animal. Kosmoceratops also has sideways oriented eye horns, although much longer and more pointed than in Utahceratops.
In all, Kosmoceratops possesses a total of 15 horns: one over the nose, one atop each eye, one at the tip of each cheek bone, and ten across the rear margin of the bony frill. That makes it the most ornate-headed dinosaur known.
Although much speculation came to daylight about the function of ceratopsian horns and frills, from fighting off predators to recognizing other members of the same species or controlling body temperature, the main idea today is that these features functioned first to enhance reproductive success. The fact is that most of the horns are lousy weapons, so the idea of attracting the individuals of the opposite sex is not so crazy.
The dinosaurs were discovered in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a place 1.9 million acres large, full with desert terrain in south-central Utah. This vast and rugged region was the last major area in the lower 48 US states to be formally mapped by cartographers and it is the largest national monument in the United States.
For most of the Late Cretaceous high sea levels flooded the lower parts of several continents around the world. In North America, a warm, shallow sea extended from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, dividing the continent into eastern and western landmasses, known as Appalachia and Laramidia.
A little is known of the plants and animals that lived on Appalachia, but the rocks of Laramidia have generated a plethora of dinosaur remains. Laramidia was less than one-third the size of present day North America, approximating the area of Australia. ■