Triceratops gets a cute new dino cousin

Everybody knows the Triceratops. But lately, other members of the horned dino family have been nosing their way into the spotlight. Now, researchers say, a new species named “Wendiceratops pinhornensis” is helping them answer questions about how the Triceratops’ characteristic horns evolved.

“Wendiceratops pinhornensis” — named for Wendy Sloboda, a prolific fossil hunter who’s discovered the remains of “Wendi” and countless other important species — makes her world debut in a study published Wednesday in PLOS ONE. She’s a 79 million year old Canadian (from Alberta, to be precise), which makes her one of the oldest members of the Ceratopsidae ever found.

And the paleontologists who put her together are very interested in her skull.

“Whether you’re looking at a triceratops or at our Wendi, all the important evolutionary details for these horned dinosaurs are in the skulls,” said study co-author Michael Ryan, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. “If you just cut their heads off and looked at their bodies from the neck down, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.”

But from the neck up, each species has its own sense of style. Their ornamentation — the horns they brandished and the hooks that frilled around their heads — seems to have evolved very quickly. Within spans of just a few million years, Ryan said, paleontologists are finding dinosaurs that stayed virtually indistinguishable from each other while sprouting strange and new headpieces.