Dinosaurs / Cretaceous / Albertaceratops
Albertaceratops
Cretaceous al-BER-tuh-SER-uh-tops, “Alberta horned face”
Albertaceratops was a horned herbivorous dinosaur that lived in what is now Alberta, Canada, during the Late Cretaceous epoch, around 78 to 77 million years ago. Measuring approximately six metres in length and weighing around three tonnes, it was a solidly built quadruped roughly the size of a white rhinoceros. When first discovered, it surprised palaeontologists because it possessed long brow horns typical of chasmosaurine ceratopsians, yet phylogenetic analysis revealed it was actually a basal centrosaurine. Its skull featured a low snout horn, long brow horns, and a pair of outward-pointing hooks on the top edge of its bony neck frill. Albertaceratops grazed on tough flowering plants, ferns, and cycads, shearing vegetation with a powerful dental battery. It provides crucial evidence for how cranial ornamentation evolved in horned dinosaurs.
It combined long brow horns with centrosaurine neck frill features, challenging earlier evolutionary models.
Where and when
Albertaceratops lived in the Late Cretaceous, from 78 to 77 million years ago (Campanian age). Its remains come from Canada and United States, in the Oldman Formation.
The numbers
Length 5.8 m (estimates run from 5.5 to 6 m). Mass about 3 t. Hip height about 1.8 m. That is 3.4 human-lengths, or 0.52 of a double-decker bus. These are estimates from partial skeleton; fields marked estimated by the site are length, mass, hip height.