Dinosaurs / Cretaceous / Kosmoceratops
Kosmoceratops
Cretaceous KOZ-moh-SEH-rah-tops, “ornate horned face”
Kosmoceratops was a flamboyant chasmosaurine ceratopsid that lived during the Late Cretaceous in the subtropical lowlands of Laramidia, now preserved in southern Utah. Measuring around four and a half to five metres long and weighing over a tonne, it was roughly the size of a white rhinoceros. Kosmoceratops is famous for its extraordinarily ornate skull, which bore fifteen distinct horns. In addition to long, sideways-pointing brow horns and a pointed nose horn, the top edge of its bony frill was lined with ten downward-curving hooks. These decorative projections were too blunt and forward-curved to serve as functional defensive weapons against large predators like tyrannosaurs. Instead, palaeontologists interpret this remarkable crest as a complex visual display structure, used for species recognition, intimidating rivals, or attracting mates within the dense, swampy forests of the Kaiparowits Formation.
It possessed fifteen separate horns and hornlets on its skull, the most of any known dinosaur.
Where and when
Kosmoceratops lived in the Late Cretaceous, from 76.4 to 75.5 million years ago (Campanian age). Its remains come from United States, in the Kaiparowits Formation.
The numbers
Length 4.8 m (estimates run from 4.5 to 5 m). Mass about 1.5 t. Hip height about 1.8 m. That is 2.8 human-lengths, or 0.43 of a double-decker bus. These are estimates from partial skeleton; fields marked estimated by the site are length, mass, hip height.