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Friday, November 16, 2012

Xenoceratops foremostensis

From Cleveland Business: Cleveland firm may aid Dallas transit agency's naming rights effort 

This and that
Around the horn: Michael Ryan, head of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, is among the scientists in Alberta who have identified a new type of horned dinosaur that looked like Triceratops but lived 15 million years earlier.

The New York Times reports that the dinosaur, called Xenoceratops foremostensis, “was a two-ton vegetarian that flourished 80 million years ago, making it the oldest known large-bodied horned dinosaur to be found in Canada.”

Dr. Ryan, author of a study in The Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences that describes the species, tells The Times, “This guy was the size of a large bull, with two big brow horns over its eyes and a big shield off the back of its skull. And it had a beak at the front of the mouth, very much like a turtle.”

Fossils of Xenoceratops were first collected in 1958, but were left unidentified at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. Dr. Ryan and a co-author, David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto, “are working on a larger effort, the Southern Alberta Dinosaur Project, that has identified about 10 new dinosaurs, including Xenoceratops,” the newspaper reports.

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