Meet ‘Hellboy,’ who sparked much curiosity — and a wedding proposal
Paleontologist used paper on breakthrough find to propose to girlfriend
Hellboy the dinosaur is more than just a scientific marvel — he’s a regular Cupid.
Nicknamed “hellboy” because of its difficult excavation, the Regaliceratops peterhewsi is the latest discovery in the dinosaur kingdom. The giant horned reptile is an important find for the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, which spent two years digging the almost-perfect skull from an Alberta river bed.
“This is a pretty big discovery,” said Caleb Brown, who works for the museum and specializes in horned dinosaurs. “The museum has been waiting about10 years for this finally to be unveiled.”
But it’s the 68-million-year-old dinosaur’s role in Brown’s love life that’s earned the creature the most fame.
When Brown published a paper on the breakthrough in Current Biology, he turned its last line into a proposal for his girlfriend. “Lorna, will you marry me?” it reads.
To cut to the chase, she said yes. The unique proposal has garnered much media attention, leaving both Brown and his fiancée Lorna O’Brien, a paleobiologist, a little shy about all the hullabaloo.
The lovebirds met at the University of Toronto while they were completing their PhDs, and both currently work at the museum.
“We don’t want the personal aspect to overshadow the reporting on the actual science,” he said. And for good reason. The regaliceratops currently on display in the museum is a stunning specimen, both because of the completeness of the skull and the role the species plays in evolutionary biology.
The most famous horned dinosaur is of course the triceratops, so named for the three impressive horns which adorn its head. “Everybody knows triceratops,” Brown said.
But what few people know is that there are two kinds of horned dinosaurs: the centrosaurs and the chasmosaurs.
Chasmosaurs (including the triceratops) have large horns over the eyes and a small horn on the nose, with a delicate frill on the back of their heads. But centrosaurs have the reverse — a big horn on the nose, small horns over the eyes and an elaborate frill.
While the Regaliceratops is definitely a chasmosaur, it shares some biological similarities to the centrosaurs, which went extinct 2 million years before the animal even existed.
“It’s what we call evolutionary convergence, it’s a chasmosaur pretending to be a centrosaurs,” he said.
This is a big deal for evolutionary biologists, who are keen to discover “in between” fossils that show the evolutionary process at work.
The 1.6-metre-wide regaliceratops skull was first found in 2005, in the Oldman River near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta. Its location would prove unique, both because fewer dinosaurs are found in the southwestern part of the province, and because the river is an environmentally protected spawning ground for bull trout.
Encased in very thick, very hard rock, it took two years for a team from the museum to dig it out because they had to be very careful not to leave any sediment in the river.
And so “hellboy” earned its nickname.
Brown said he chose to propose the way he did because he hoped that his marriage, like these fossils, will stand the test of time.
“I wanted to do something unique and spontaneous,” he said. “It has a certain amount of immortality, in that the statement is linked with the new species.”