Episode 65 is all about Utahceratops, a three-horned ceratopsian with a large head.
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In this episode, we discuss:
- The dinosaur of the day: Utahceratops
- Name means Utah horn face
- Species: Utahceratops gettyi
- Species name is after Mike Getty, who found the holotype and helped recover fossils in the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument
- Named in 2010 by Scott Sampson, Mark Loewen, Andrew Farke, Eric Roberts, Catherine Forster, Joshua Smith, and Alan Titus
- Lived in the late Cretaceous in what is now Utah
- Found in the Kaiparowits Formation (in Grand Staircase) in Utah
- Holotype consists of a partial skull
- Six specimens found, including two partial skulls
- quadrupedal
- Large, about 23 ft (7 m) long
- About 6 ft (2 m) tall
- Averaged 3-4 metric tons
- Skull was about 7 ft (2.3 m) long
- Had hundreds of teeth in a dental battery, used to chomp down on plants
- Large frill and three horns, but the horns over eyes were not as large as the horns over a Triceratops eyes (short, stubby, and pointed to the side)
- Also had two holes in its frill, to help reduce the weight of its skull
- Nose horn stuck straight up
- Horns were probably to attract mates or scare off rivals, not really used as defense
- Been likened as a “giant rhino with a ridiculously supersized head” by co-author Mark Loewen
- Named at the same time as Kosmoceratops (same paper in PLOS One, called “New Horned Dinosaurs from Utah Provide Evidence for Intracontinental Dinosaur Endemism”)
- Kosmoceratops had more ornate horns/frills
- Utahceratops was larger than Kosmoceratops
- Because Utahceratops lived in the same time and place as Kosmoceratops, and these two ceratopsians lived at the same time as other ceratopsids in Montana and Alberta, Canada, scientists think there was some barrier in northern Utah to keep them from mingling. But it’s unclear what that barrier could have been
In the Cretaceous, western and eastern North America was separated by a flooding of water - Paleontologist Thomas Holtz said to National Geographic News, “If you were a time traveler and you went back to the late Cretaceous, you could take a boat from the Gulf of Mexico and sail all the way up to the Arctic Ocean and you wouldn’t see land.”
- Utahceratops lived on a floodplain with lots of swamps, ponds, and lakes, in a wet, humid climate
- Other dinosaurs in the area included tyrannosaurid Tertophoneus, hadrosaurs Parasaurolophus and Gryposaurus, ceratopsians Nasutoceratops and Kosmoceratops
- Can see Utahceratops at the Natural History Museum of Utah
- Ceratopsians were ornithiscians
- Lived in North America and Asia
- They had beaks and cheek teeth to eat fiberous vegetation
- Also had a frill (used for defense, regulating body temperature, attracting mates, or signaling danger)
- Probably traveled in herds and could then stampede if threatened
- Chasmosaurinae is a subfamily of ceratopsid
- Chasmosaurinae had large brow horns and long frills (compared to centrosaurines, another subfamily of ceratopsid, which had short brow horns and shorter frills with long spines coming out of the frills)
- Chasmosaurine fossils have been found in western Canada, the western United States, and northern Mexico.
- Fun Fact: Aside from several hadrosaurs (Brachylophosaurus, Gilmoreosaurus, Bactrosaurus and Edmontosaurus) and the recent discovery in a titanosaur, tumors have been found on other fossils. According to Discovery News: “The oldest known case of osteoma dates to the early Carboniferous (a period spanning 359.2 million to 299 million years ago) in the North American fish Phanerosteon mirabile. The mosasaur Platecarpus, a marine reptile, also had an osteoma, as did a crocodile, Leidyosuchus formidabilis.“
