One of the most familiar dinosaur images is that of the veggie horned rhino called ceratopsid dinosaur. A new member has been added to this gallery: a Mexican species with large neck frill and three giant horns that lived on a lush beach environment 72 Ma ago (in the Late Cretaceous). The species was found in Coahuila desert, once the bottom of a sea whose shores were roamed by various dinosaurs.

The new species is related to the Triceratops, the largest ceratopsid (the possessor of the largest head of any terrestrial animal ever), being slightly smaller: 23 ft (7 m) long with 3 ft (0.9 m)-long horns. The neck frill could extend.
"The scientific name of the new dinosaur will not be revealed until the end of the year," said co-author Scott Sampson, a curator from Utah Museum of Natural History.

Another dinosaur from the same area had been announced by scientists in February: a new duck-billed species called Velafrons coahuilensis, which lived in large herds. The Coahuila's sediments may reveal many other new species of dinosaurs.
The ceratopsids are believed to have used their massive horns to repel predators. But the horns and the neck frills must have had also a crucial role during the breeding season, when males combated like deer or horned mammals.

"That whole section of the head was for sexual display, it was all ornamentation," paleontologist Terry Gates, also of the University of Utah museum and co-discoverer of Velafrons, said about the neck frill.

At the time, the area was haunted by a smaller variant of the T-rex.

"The Tyrannosaur in Coahuila was a little smaller but still nothing you would want to run into in a dark alley. It was more than 30 ft (10 m) long and rather intimidating," said Sampson (the T-rex was 12 m (36 ft) long).

In the late Cretaceous, North America was split in two by a large inland sea going from the Arctic Ocean to Mexico's Gulf.

"The land mass these animals lived on was less than 20% the size of present-day North America yet we have all of these different elephant-sized animals," said Samson.

"What makes the area in Mexico unique is evidence of sea levels that rose and receded over a period of thousands of years, forcing animals to adapt to new types of environments or pushing some towards extinction. Clues from tens of millions of years ago can help scientists understand how nature could react to rising sea levels due to climate changes that are melting polar ice caps," said Gates.