New 'Bizarre' Horned Dinosaur Species Identified in Canada

Toronto: A new species of dinosaur nicknamed 'Hellboy' because of its bizarre horns has been identified from bones discovered a decade ago in Canada.

About 10 years ago, Peter Hews stumbled across some bones sticking out of a cliff along the Oldman River in southeastern Alberta.

Now, scientists have found that those bones belonged to a nearly intact skull of a very unusual horned dinosaur - a close relative of the familiar Triceratops that had been unknown to science until now.

"The specimen comes from a geographic region of Alberta where we have not found horned dinosaurs before, so from the onset we knew it was important," said Dr Caleb Brown of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta, Canada.

"However, it was not until the specimen was being slowly prepared from the rocks in the laboratory that the full anatomy was uncovered, and the bizarre suite of characters revealed," Dr Brown said.

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"Once it was prepared it was obviously a new species, and an unexpected one at that. Many horned-dinosaur researchers who visited the museum did a double take when they first saw it in the laboratory," he said.

What made this new horned dinosaur distinctive was the size and shape of its facial horns and the shield-like frill at the back of the skull.

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The new species is similar in many respects to Triceratops, except that its nose horn is taller and the two horns over its eyes are "almost comically small."

The dinosaur's most distinctive feature is that frill, including what Brown describes as a halo of large, pentagonal plates radiating outward, as well as a central spike.

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"The combined result looks like a crown," he said. Brown and study co-author Donald Henderson named the new dinosaur Regaliceratops peterhewsi, a reference to its crown-like frill and to the man who first found and reported it to the museum.

Despite the formal name, the scientists say they have taken to calling this dinosaur by the nickname "Hellboy."

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While this new dinosaur is intriguing in its own right, researchers said what is most significant are the implications for the evolution of dinosaurs' horned ornamentation.

It has long been known that horned dinosaurs fall into one of two groups: the Chasmosaurines, with a small horn over the nose, larger horns over the eyes, and a long frill, and the Centrosaurines, characterised by a large horn over the nose, small horns over the eyes, and a short frill.

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"This new species is a Chasmosaurine, but it has ornamentation more similar to Centrosaurines," Dr Brown said.

"It also comes from a time period following the extinction of the Centrosaurines," said Dr Brown.

Taken together, he said, that makes this the first example of evolutionary convergence in horned dinosaurs, meaning that these two groups independently evolved similar features.

The study was published in the journal Current Biology.