Episode 453: Who destroyed the Central Park Dinosaurs? Boss Tweed has long been blamed for vandalizing New York City’s version of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, but it turns out someone else was to blame.

News:

• There’s a new neornithischian dinosaur, Minimocursor source

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The dinosaur of the day: Anchiceratops

• Anchiceratops, request from Victrix via patreon/discord
• Chasmosaurine ceratopsid that lived in the Late Cretaceous in what is now Alberta, Canada
• Looked similar to Triceratops
• Had two long brow horns and a short nasal horn
• Frill was long and rectangular, with triangular projections along the edges
• Stout and muscular, walked on all fours, had a short tail, and a beak (which is what makes it a ceratopsian)
• Medium-sized
• Estimated to be up to 14 ft (4.3 m) long
• Estimated to weigh 1.2 tonnes
• Fossils first found in 1912 by Barnum Brown, along the Red Deer River (found three partial skulls)
• Described in 1914 by Barnum Brown
• Holotype includes the back half of the skull, and the long frill
• Brown in 1914 wrote: “Besides showing a unique type of crest this genus adds one more link in the morphological chain by which the ceratopsian crest has been developed”
• Also made a cast of the brain, “that in accuracy of detail has rarely been equaled in fossil crania”
• Type and only species is Anchiceratops ornatus
• Genus name means “near horned face” or “near Ceratops”
• Brown thought Anchiceratops was a transitional dinosaur closely related (and in between) Monoclonius and Triceratops
• Species name refers to the ornamentation on its frill
• Charles M. Sternberg found a complete, more slender skull in 1924, which he described in 1929 as the second species Anchiceratops longirostris (but now Anchiceratops longirostris is considered to be a junior synonym of Anchiceratops ornatus)
• Most fossils found in the Horsehoe Canyon Formation, some found in the Oldman and Dinosaur Park Formations (may be early Anchiceratops ornatus or a second species), and some found at the St. Mary River Formation, but too fragmentary to refer to a species
• Fossils also possibly found in the Almond Formation in Wyoming, U.S.
• One or two possible bonebeds found in Alberta, but hasn’t been described
• Ten skulls found
• Skulls show individual variation, though in the past paleontologists thought the differences were due to sexual dimorphism (the larger skulls with longer horns were males)
• Variation in the skulls (size of horns and frill) could be due to ontogeny (changed as it grew up)
• One specimen had 30 tail vertebrae (most chasmosaurs have 46 tail vertebrae), a long pelvis, and long neck. However, this specimen (NMC 8547) may actually be Arrhinoceratops. If that’s the case, there hasn’t really been any Anchiceratops skeletons described (only skulls)
• Mallon in 2010 said the skeleton Sternberg collected in 1925 was complete and articulated and Sternberg attributed it to Anchiceratops, “although he did not give a reason for his identification”
• Lived in a subtropical climate
• Other dinosaurs that lived around the same time and place included maniraptorans such as Epichirostenotes, ornithomimids such as Ornithomimus, pachycephalosaurids such as Sphaerotholus, hadrosaurs such as Edmontosaurus, ceratopsians such as Pachyrhinosaurus, and tyrannosaurs such as Albertosaurus
• Anchiceratops fossils found in marine sediments, so may have lived in estuaries (where rivers meet ocean or larger bodies of water)
• In 1959 Wann Langston Jr. suggested Anchiceratops was semi-aquatic, with its long snout helping it to walk through deeper swamps and its frill to help it counterbalance and point its beak upwards so it could take breaths, and that its short tail, large body, and stocky limbs made it sluggish and it would have “enjoyed relative seclusion and protection of a swampy environment”
• Most paleontologists didn’t agree, but Jordan Mallon suggested NMC 8547 was like a modern hippo, and that’s why it was so robust and muscular (though the small tail didn’t help). Its body type may have helped it move through muddy, lowland swamps
• Mallon wrote: “It is possible that other ceratopsids were also adapted to semi-aquatic life, as the clade shares several features in common with the hippo. It is important to limit speculation via reference to circumstantial sedimentology, however, as several ceratopsids are known from well-drained alluvial settings”
• Anchiceratops ornatus species lasted about 1.5 to 2 million years
• Other ceratopsid species lasted a long time (Triceratops horridus for 1.5 million years and Pentaceratops sternbergi for 2.5 million years) but in the Dinosaur Park Formation where Anchiceratops was found, most species lasted about 700,000 years
• Species lived for a long time, possibly because there wasn’t as much dinosaur diversity in the Horseshoe Canyon Formation, and there wasn’t as much competition for food. Or could be because the Western Interior Seaway was shrinking, so there wasn’t as much habitat fragmentation so Anchiceratops seems to have lasted longer. Or it could be Anchiceratops was good at dealing with environmental changes

Fun Fact:

Boss Tweed wasn’t the culprit behind the smashing of the Central Park dinosaurs.

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