Canada's newest dinosaur an 'alien-horned' beast

Scientists have come up with a likeness ofCanadas newest dinosaur, Xenoceratops foremostensis, more than 50 years after the firstfossilizedfragments of one were dug up in southern Alberta.

Its new name comes from the Greek words meaning "alien-horned face."

Pieces of skull and neck bone sat on a shelf in Ottawas Museum of Nature after they were unearthed at a dig near Foremost, Alta., in 1958.

They were forgotten until 2003 when paleontologists Michael Ryan and David Evans started their own investigation for their research paper on fossils that were first discovered in that area of Alberta the far southeast corner.

Six years later,they foundadditional skull fragments from the same creature that had been placed in an old plaster field jacket.

As detailed in the October issue of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, the pair took all the fragments to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where they were able to put together a metre-long piece of neck bone.

As a result, a team was able to imagine what the animal looked like. In a word, itwasfearsome. The animal weighed 3,000 kilograms, with a beak-like mouth and a frightening appearance that included a massive neck shield topped by two large spikes. They think it wassix metres long.The dinosaur roamed Albertaalmost 80 million years ago, making it the oldest-known, large-bodied dinosaur from Canada.

"Xenoceratops foremostensis shows us that even the geologically oldest ceratopsids [big-horned dinosaurs] had massive spikes on their head shields and that their cranial ornamentation would only become more elaborate as new species evolved," said Ryan, curator of vertebrate paleontology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

According to Ryan, the horns might have been used to attract female counterparts.He theorizes the males with the bigger horns were more successful reproductively.

"The early fossil record of ceratopsids remains scantXenoceratops provides new information on the early evolution of ceratopsids," said the reports co-author, David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum and University of Toronto.