2 horned dinosaur species announced, skulls unveiled

SALT LAKE CITY — A September morning would usually find Scott Sampson and Mark Loewen chipping away at the rugged terrain at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, right in the middle of the prime, three-month dinosaur-digging season, and just following the departure of southern Utah's cedar gnats and summer storms.

Instead, the two paleontologists were at the Utah Museum of Natural History on Wednesday to announce the naming of two new "weird and wonderful" species of horned dinosaurs related to Triceratops. The skulls of Utahceratops gettyi and Kosmoceratops richardsoni, named after discoverers Mike Getty and Scott Richardson, are just the latest finds in the 2 million largely unexplored acres of Grand Staircase-Escalante.

Sampson and Loewen published their findings Wednesday, in PLoS ONE, the online journal of the Public Library of Science.

Seventy-five million years ago, the Earth was a warm, wet world with flooded continents and no polar ice caps. Southern Utah was beachfront property on the sea separating the western continent of Laramidia from Appalachia to the east.

Scientists have long been puzzled over how at least 20 species of very large animals could live at the same time on different parts of that stretch of land from present-day Alaska to Mexico. The two new species only add to that mystery, part of a wave of discoveries that has doubled the number of known horned dinosaurs since 2004, to 30. One theory is that the warm climate — Sampson likened it to a Louisiana bayou — supplied ample vegetation for animals whose low metabolism required little food.

Kosmoceratops is especially bizarre, its head crowned by an array of 15 horns. Sampson said that due to their structure, they were more likely used to attract mates than for defense. "It's just truly remarkable in many different ways," he said.

Richardson, a Bureau of Land Management volunteer, stumbled across a softball-sized chunk of the skull one day in 2006. Getty, the museum's collections manager, who maintains the research group's primitive base camp about an hour-and-a-half drive over rough roads from Cannonville, in Utah's Garfield County, found the first fragments of Utahceratops' massive 7-foot skull poking out of a hillside in 2000.