Thursday, Dec. 09, 2010
The Horniest Dinosaur That Ever Lived
Settle down, we're talking real horns — 15 of them to be exact, decorating the giant head of the 5,500-lb. (2,500-kg) Kosmoceratops, a beast that lived 76 million years ago in what is now Utah. Its fossilized remains were discovered by a University of Utah expedition in 2007, but the dino was formally described and named only in September of 2010. The bones shed light not only on the fanciful kinds of beasts that lived so long ago, but on the unfamiliar place North America was. Though the Kosmoceratops lived in Utah, it was a coastal dweller, making its home along the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway, a great body of water that divided the continent in two.