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Xenoceratops means ‘alien horned-face,’ referring to the strange pattern of horns on its head and the scarcity of horned dinosaur fossils from this part of the fossil record, it also honors the Village of Foremost, located close to where the fossils were found.
The dinosaur was about 20 feet (6 meters) long and weighed more than 2 tons. It had a parrot-like beak with two long brow horns above its eyes, a large frill protruded from the back of its skull featuring two huge spikes.
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The first dinosaur remains were believed to be found in 1676 by Robert Plot, who was the curator of an English museum.
In 1822, Mary Ann Mantell and her husband, Gideon, found enormous teeth believed to be the remains of a huge, extinct iguana.
Finally, in 1841, British scientist Richard Owen coined the word "Dinosauria" (which means "fearfully great reptile" or "terrible reptile"). He realized that the bones belonged to no existing animal.
Since then, over 700 species of Dinosauria have been discovered and named.
Recently, a new species of the family ceratopsidae has been identified. Not only is this extraordinarily rare, but extremely valuable for piecing together the puzzle of this group of dinosaur species.
The dinosaur is described from skull fragments from at least three individuals from the Foremost Formation originally collected by Dr Wann Langston Jr. in the 1950s, and is currently housed in theCanadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Canada.
Dr Ryan and Dr Evans stumbled upon the undescribed material more than a decade ago and recognized the bones as a new type of horned dinosaur. Dr Evans later discovered a 50-year-old plaster field jacket at the Canadian Museum of Nature containing more skull bones from the same fossil locality and had them prepared in his lab at the Royal Ontario Museum.
