The Triceratops is known for its considerable size, horns, and the frill on its head, but new research shows it had a less showy, much smaller cousin.
According to National Geographic, Hualianceratops wucaiwanensis is one of the oldest ceratopsians (the group Triceratops belongs to) ever discovered. The fossil the researchers examined for their study, published in the journal PLOS One, is about 160 million years old.
"Finding these two species in the same fossil beds reveals there was more diversity there than we previously recognized," study co-author Catherine Forster, professor of biology in the Geological Sciences program at George Washington University, said in a press release. "It suggests that the ceratopsian dinosaurs already had diversified into at least four lineages by the beginning of the Jurassic Period."
H. wucaiwanensis, whose name means "ornamental face," had bone bumps on its skull, a neck frill, and a beak used for plant-eating like the Triceratops, Reuters noted. But unlike its descendant, it was small and walked on two legs.
"Identifying Hualianceratops allows us to expand the beaked family of dinosaurs (Ceratopsia), which includes popular species like Triceratops and Psittacosaurus," study lead author Fenglu Han, a postdoctoral student in the School of Earth Sciences at China University of Geosciences, said in the release. "Now we know the horned dinosaurs thrived in the early Late Jurassic, and they co-existed with Guanlong, which was an early relative of T. rex and maybe threatened them."
