Dinosaur discovered sporting huge horns
An armoured dinosaur with 4ft horns - the longest known among the extinct reptiles - has been unearthed in Mexico.
The 72 million-year-old rhino-sized plant-eater Coahuilaceratops magnacuerna was an ancestor of the famous three-horned Triceratops.
Like other horned dinosaurs, or ceratopsids, it had a large bony plate behind its head which would have acted as a shield.
Coahuilaceratops' most notable feature are the two enormous horns that jut out from above its eyes.
Fossil bones of an adult animal, which weighed four to five tons, measured around 22ft, and stood six to seven feet tall at the shoulder and hip, were recovered from a site in the state of Coahuila, southern Mexico, in 2003. Remains of a juvenile were also found nearby.
Scientists believe the horns were most probably used in mating contests rather than to fight off predators.
Lead researcher Dr Mark Loewen, from the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City, US, said: "The horned dinosaurs are an extraordinary example of vertebrate evolution.
"They evolved and diversified... along a thin strip of land that stretched from Alaska to Mexico. Finding this horned dinosaur so far south in Mexico offers us a different picture of what the ancestors of Triceratops were like."
A description of the dinosaur appears in a book, New Perspectives on Horned Dinosaurs, published this week by Indiana University Press.
The site where the fossils were discovered, called the Cerro del Pueblo Formation, is in an arid Mexican desert.
However, 72 million years ago the region was a humid estuary with lush vegetation.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
The horns are very large. It is noticed that they are not flesh eater but vegetable eater. Their horns maybe used to protect him from others giant dinosaurs. Their computer models are also nice. austin dwi lawyers
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The triceratops is one bad ass dino!