If head
frills were a fashion statement, a newly identified 73-million-year-old
triceratops relative was certainly at the top of its game.
The
newfound dinosaur named Crittendenceratops
krzyzanowskii sported a fancy frill on the top of its head, a new
study finds. In fact, it's the youngest-known dinosaur of its clade (the
nasutoceratopsins), as well as the first of its clade on record to sport an
elaborate frill, the researchers said.
"This
clade has simple frills." said study co-lead researcher Sebastian Dalman,
who was at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science at the time of
the research. "Crittendenceratops is the first member of this clade
with [an] ornamented frill." [Tiny
& Old: Images of 'Triceratops' Ancestors]
The late
Stan Krzyzanowski, a research associate at the New Mexico Museum of Natural
History and Science, discovered two of the late Cretaceous creatures
in the 1990s in a mountain range near Tucson, Arizona. Krzyzanowski and his
colleagues briefly described the dinosaur in a 2003 study, but it wasn't until
recently that another look at the fossils revealed they represented an
unidentified species.
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