New Horned Dinosaur Species Found in Prehistoric Graveyard in the Badlands of Alberta, Canada.

CLEVELAND -- A new species of horned dinosaur that lived during the Late Cretaceous Period, about 76 million years ago, was found in a fossil bed at a prehistoric graveyard in the badlands of Alberta, Canada.

Dr. Michael J. Ryan, curator and head of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology for The Cleveland Museum of Natural History made the announcement today to coincide with the publication on the new species in the latest volume of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.

The new species, named Centrosaurus brinkmani, belongs to the group of dinosaurs related to the well-known Triceratops, but lived about 10 million years earlier. Remains of the dinosaur were discovered in bone beds in southern Alberta, the largest of which is in Dinosaur Provincial Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Ceratopsian (horned) dinosaurs can be distinguished from one another by the ornamentation on their frills that extend shield-like from the back of their skulls. Distinctive hooks and "spikelets" on the frill allowed scientists to identify this dinosaur as a new species.

"It looks like someone stuck a bunch of long-spined sea anemones all around the margin of the frill," Ryan said.

"The ornamentation on the frill was probably not used as defensive weaponry -- the clusters of spikes would have been too small," said co-author Dr. Tony Russell, professor of Zoology at the University of Calgary.

"The spikes were probably more important in signaling sexual maturity to others in the group," said Russell. "The centrosaurus may have even used them to push each other around in battles over females just as Bighorn sheep rams do today."

"These bone beds are good evidence that Centrosaurus brinkmani lived and moved in large herds for at least part of the year," said Ryan. "Whatever killed them deposited their bodies together, where they decayed and fell apart before they were fossilized. Because all the bones had come apart it took us a couple of years of excavation to recover enough pieces to realize that we had something new."

The species is named in honor of Dr. Donald Brinkman, a paleontologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum and long-time colleague of Ryan. "Don's been a great supporter of vertebrate paleontology in Alberta and helping students, so it's a pleasure to tip my field cap to him in this way," said Ryan.

Centrosaurus brinkmani is one of the few new dinosaurs to be named from Alberta in the past few decades, and the first new dinosaur to be named based on complete skeletal material from Dinosaur Provincial Park since the 1970's.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum is 6 km northwest of Drumheller. Call [phone]. Call The Cleveland Museum of Natural History at [phone] or 800-317-9155. Artwork is available at the Museum's web site www.cmnh.org.