Alberta Yields New Horned Dinosaur

The remains of a Sinops were found nearly a century ago, but were classified only this year.

In our ongoing coverage of the wild world of dinosaurs, today we find out that remains found in Alberta a century ago were actually those of a previously undiscovered species of horned dinosaur. Back in 1916, the father-son duo of Charles and Levi Sternberg uncovered two fossilized skulls in southern Alberta. They sent the remains off to the Natural History Museum in London, but the braintrust at the museum figured that the skulls were "rubbish." Fast-forward to 2011, when researchers were combing through the museum's archives and stumbled upon the skulls. After studying the pair of fossils, they decided that the remains were those of an unnamed, multi-horned dinosaur closely related to the famed triceratops. The researchers decided on Spinops sternbergorum for the name so as to pay tribute to the fossils' initial founders. Spinops was a plant-eater, with a distinctive horn on its snout as well as four spikes jutting out from its neck plate.