A team of scientists detailed the Wendiceratops pinhornensis, a 79-million-year-old cousin to the Triceratops.
According to the Washington Post, authors of a study published in the journal PLOS One determined "Wendi" is the oldest known members of the Ceratopsidae, to which the Triceratops belongs. The dinosaur was named for Wendy Sloboda, the paleontologist who discovered the fossil in Alberta, Canada.
"Wendiceratops helps us understand the early evolution of skull ornamentation in an iconic group of dinosaurs characterized by their horned faces," study co-author David Evans, of the Royal Ontario Museum, said in a press release. "The wide frill of Wendiceratops is ringed by numerous curled horns, the nose had a large, upright horn, and it's likely there were horns over the eyes too. The number of gnarly frill projections and horns makes it one of the most striking horned dinosaurs ever found."
Wendi's skull is what sets it apart from other Ceratopsidae dinosaurs, as her body from below the neck resembles that of most her family members.
"Whether you're looking at a triceratops or at our Wendi, all the important evolutionary details for these horned dinosaurs are in the skulls," study co-author Michael Ryan, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, told the Post. "If you just cut their heads off and looked at their bodies from the neck down, you wouldn't be able to tell them apart.
"Between having nothing and having a very large horn - Wendi falls in the middle.
"And when you look at the tree of life for this group, this new species also falls right in the middle of it. So it makes sense that we're looking at the ongoing evolution of a key part of the skull ornamentation."
