Horned ceratopsid dinosaurs, the family that includes the familiar triceratops, are famous for their oversized noses, but a specimen recovered in southern Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument takes this facial proboscis to new lengths.
The specimen formally earned a species name Wednesday as the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU) unveiled the fossilized remains. The research team led by Scott Sampson, now vice president of Research & Collections at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, dubbed it in honor of the monument's paleontologist, Alan Titus.
Nasutoceratops titusi was a 15-foot-long, 2.5-ton plant-eater that roamed the eastern shore of a land called Laramidia about 76 million years ago, according to University of Utah research published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The genus name is Latin for "big-nose horn face." Its head features massive horns over each eye and a beak-like protrusion beyond its jaws.
"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 Sampson, who conducted the research when he was a NHMU curator.
Then-graduate student Eric Lund discovered the specimen in 2006 in the pink and gray mudstones of the Kaiparowits Formation. Lund made his find during a field expedition about 12 miles southeast of Kodachrome Basin State Park. He observed the lower part of a skull protruding from a cliff, and a Univeristy of Utah team eventually recovered most of the horned skull and a forelimb.
The research team spent a few years assembling the skull.