With two horns on its nose

Oct 23, 2006 08:24 GMT  ·  By

Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is a real bonanza for dinosaur hunters and every expedition results in the discovery of at least one new species.

In 2002, paleontologists Jim Kirkland and Don DeBlieux have found the skull of a horned dinosaur from about 80 million years ago. DeBlieux found the fossil while conducting an inventory of paleontological resources in the National Monument as part of a Utah Geological Survey team. "I stopped and put my backpack down on a sandstone ledge and saw bone,'' said DeBlieux.

The skull belonged to a rhinoceros sized ceratopsid dinosaur. Ceratopsids were plant eating dinosaurs characterized by a beak, and elaborate horns and frills. The most known ceratopsid is Triceratops. (image)

The team needed about three years to remove the rock block containing the skull, due to its size and to the remote area. The Grand Staircase-Escalante monument is located near the Utah-Arizona border and is intersected by a relatively small number of dirt roads, some of them barely passable.

The new ceratopsid species is unique for having two nose horns. Till now, Utah has been scarce in fossils of this kind of dinosaurs, with only one genus being found previously in this state.

"The fossil should have a formal name in about a year and be ready for display at the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah," said chief curator Scott Sampson. "There is a "treasure trove'' of fossils in the 1.9 million acres that make up the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument."

"People think we've already found all the dinosaurs, but we're just really scratching the surface,'' he said. "Virtually every new animal we're pulling out of Grand Staircase is a new species.''

And recently, a team from the University of Utah has found an even bigger ceratopsid dinosaur.