After tossing about ideas for the title of this blog for a while, I settled on a twist on the title of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. I then had to decide between dinosaurs with a nice hard "C" at the beginning of their generic name. There were some good ones. I ultimately chose "chasmosaurs" because I've always liked the name, and I liked that it wasn't a single dinosaur, but rather a whole tribe of ceratopsids, always one of my favorite groups. In contrast to their centrosaurine relatives, the chasmosaurine ceratopsids are distingushed by larger brow horns and frills.
Today, a team of scientists led by Dr. Scott Sampson has published a paper in PLoS One, revealing two new members of the chasmosaurine line: Kosmoceratops richardsoni and Utahceratops gettyi. They were denizens of the southern part of Laramidia, a small continent formed by the sea that clove North America in twain during the Late Cretaceous. Kosmoceratops sported especially odd headgear: long, sideways-pointing brow horns and swept-forward spikes lining the top of its frill.
Utahceratops and Kosmoceratops with a map of Laramidia. Copyright Lukas Panzarin, provided by the University of Utah.
As you would expect from research led by Dr. Sampson, the paper concerns itself with larger issues of dinosaur ecology. The authors present a convincing scenario of two coexisting lines of chasmosaurs, one in the north and one in the south, separated by an as-yet unknown barrier.
Laramidia was a strange place. There was a narrow strip of land crammed between the sea mentioned earlier and a great mountain range containing the future Sierra Nevadas (the Rockies were only just beginning to form). Most of the North American late cretaceous dinosaurs we know are from this ribbon of low-lying land on Laramidia, a veritable dinosaurian paradise. This is the big, exciting question the paper asks. Why was there such a stunning diversity of dinosaurs in such a small area? I'm looking forward to more discoveries, and more reconstructions by Lukas Panzarin. Dude's got skills.
The Open Source Paleontologist (the blog of paper co-author Andrew Farke)
University of Utah press release