
Move over Triceratops: There's a new horned dinosaur in town and its cranial ornamentation is even more impressive than the three-horned dinosaur the world has come to know and love.
A study of the recently discovered species, Mercuriceratops gemini, provides more details on this flashy dinosaur, which possessed not only the standard trifecta of facial horns, but also a giant, winglike frill protruding from the back of its skull.
"The butterfly-shaped frill, or neck shield, of Mercuriceratops is unlike anything we have seen before," said David Evans, co-author of the new study and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada, in a statement. "Mercuriceratops shows that evolution gave rise to much greater variation in horned dinosaur headgear than we had previously suspected."
The research describing the new species is based on fossil evidence collected from Montana as well as Alberta, Canada. Mercuriceratops gemini lived about 77 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous Period, and was approximately 20 feet long and weighed more than 2 tons. LikeTriceratops and other ceratopsid dinosaurs, Mercuriceratops was a plant-eating dinosaur and researchers believe it had a parrotlike beak, as well as two long brow horns above its eyes.
Its headgear, though, is in a league all its own.
"Mercuriceratops took a unique evolutionary path that shaped the large frill on the back of its skull into protruding wings like the decorative fins on classic 1950s cars," said Michael Ryan, lead author of the study and curator of vertebrate paleontology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio, in the statement. "It definitively would have stood out from the herd during the Late Cretaceous."