Newly-discovered dinosaur looks like a cartoon character

Paleontologists have discovered a new species of dinosaur from fossils dug up in Utah, and with this 'big-nosed horned face' dino's appearance, it looks like it would be welcome on the pages of any illustrated children's book.

'Big-nosed horned face' is actually the new dinosaur's official name, by the way, although the paleontologists went with the Latin version — Nasutoceratops titusi — and as you can probably guess, this species belongs to the same family as Triceratops. Apparently, although it looks like that nose would give him an exceptional sense of smell, if this big guy ever does show up in a cartoon, the writers better stay away from that idea if they want to keep it accurate.

"The jumbo-sized schnoz of Nasutoceratops likely had nothing to do with a heightened sense of smell — since olfactory receptors occur further back in the head, adjacent to the brain — and the function of this bizarre feature remains uncertain," said Scott Sampson, the lead author of the study, according to a Denver Museum of Nature & Science press release.

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The large horns on this dinosaur may give the impression that it was a fighter, but as study co-author Mark Loewen, from the Natural History Museum of Utah said in the news release: "The amazing horns of Nasutoceratops were most likely used as visual signals of dominance and, when that wasn't enough, as weapons for combating rivals."

It was back in 2006 that fossil hunters found the first evidence of this massive plant-eater, when they dug up a nearly-complete skull and several other fossilized bones while at the Kaiparowits Plateau in southern Utah. From where the fossils were found, researchers discovered that this species lived roughly 76 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous period, when North America was split into two different island continents — Appalachia in the east, and Laramidia in the west — by a wide sea called the Western Interior Seaway.

Laramidia extended from southern Mexico to Alaska, including everything as far east as Arizona, Utah, Idaho and western Montana, and it was home to dinosaur species such as the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, dome-headed dinos like the Pachycephalosaurus, small predator dinosaurs (similar to the popular 'Velociraptor') called dromaeosaurids, and even some of the largest creatures to ever walk the Earth, titanosaurs.

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Besides being a newly-discovered species of dinosaur, the research into N. titusi also gave strong evidence for the idea of 'dinosaur provincialism'. This is the hypothesis put forward that, although the same major 'groups' of dinosaurs lived throughout the continent, different species of those groups lived in different areas — some only in the north, and some only in the south. In the case of N. titisu, which lived in the southern parts of Laramidia, its closest relative, Avaceratops lammersi, lived in the north.

This 'provincialism' was an unusual find for scientists, since there were apparently more than two dozen giant species living on Laramidia, but these days, there are only five 'giant' mammals living in Africa, which has about four times the land-mass of Laramidia.

"We’re still working to figure out how so many different kinds of giant animals managed to coexist on such a small landmass," said Loewen.

(Image courtesy: Sampson et al/Lukas Panzarin)

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