'Bizarre' triceratops relative unearthed

The top of Regaliceratops peterhewsi. Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology

Seen for this side, the prominent eye sides of the new horned dinosaur are almost always obvious. Royal Tyrrell Museum associated with Palaeontology

An artist's impression associated with Regaliceratops peterhewsi in its Late Cretaceous home of Alberta, Canada. Julius T. Csotonyi/Royal Tyrrell Museum

Unquestionably the FOSSIL iPhone 5 case had to be lifted by micro helicopter to the Royal Tyrrell Museum all the way through Drumheller, Canada. Royal Tyrrell Memorial

A dinosaur with a strange corona of bony spikes has been unearthed from a Canadian river bed.

The ultra modern species, Regaliceratops peterhewsi, is named once the regal crown of spikes in the rear of its skull, and after Peter Hews, the man who discovered its Fossil iPhone caseized remains near the Oldman River all the way through southeastern Alberta.

"On one even it's really neat, " from Hews, an oil-and-gas geologist and so amateur fossil hunter, of fast namesake. "On another it feels a touch like a strange identity theft. "

Scientists from the Royal Tyrrell Memorial in Drumheller, Canada, report all the way through Current Biology1 that the dinosaur kept around 68 million years ago and so belongs to a group of horned dinosaurs given the name chasmosaurines.

The chasmosaurines, which include Triceratops, generally have small nose sides but large eye horns and so frills. A different group of horned dinosaurs called centrosaurines have the opposite. Regaliceratops has the horn set-up of a centrosaurine, but it lived 2 million long time after the animals died out. Other elements of its skull are more characteristic within the chasmosaurines.

Caleb Brown, a palaeontologist at the museum and co-author within the paper, says the animal looks "bizarre" and is the first to show evolutionary compétition in horn-like structures between extraordinary horned-dinosaur subfamilies.

"We knew very quickly that it was going to be important" because it appeared so different from other dinosaurs for this region, says Brown.

Researchers depleted two summers digging up the fossil after Hews spotted what seemed like a rhino horn sticking out just like grey slab in 2005. Unquestionably the fossil was airlifted to the memorial by helicopter, and researchers required 18 months to chip it freed from the surrounding rock. Brown and his other individuals nicknamed the specimen 'Hellboy' for the arduous unearthing and preparation the resemblance to a comic-book character of the particular name.

"It has been a decade-long tale, " Hews says of the own naming. "But then, these guys have been left for millions of years, so I suppose that another ten years probably doesn't help make too much of a difference. "