RE: New Texas Ceratopsians

["Dan Lipkowitz" <lipkowit@midway.uchicago.edu>]

In message Wed, 8 May 1996 11:11:27 -0400,
  "D. Tanke" <dtanke@dns.magtech.ab.ca>  writes:

> This morning one of our brand new contract preparators mentioned
> having caught the tail end of a T.V. story last night (the 6th) on a
> new and weird ceratopsian from a "park" (?Big Bend National Park?)
> in Texas. Apparently Paul Sereno had a 2 week long field class down
> there and two geology students found the skull in a formation that
> has never yielded dinosaur material before.

This ceratopsian (or ceratopian, if that's your preference) skull was
found on the undergraduate trip prior to the one I attended in
March. Sereno did not teach the course for two consecutive years, so
it must have been found in '93.  The field trip to Big Bend is
actually shorter than you might think -- we have 9-10 days off
altogether, and 4-5 of those are spent taking a bus from Chicago to
Texas and back (yep, a busload of paleontology students.  Scary, huh?
Even scarier was the fact that we lost a wheel -- not a tire, a
*wheel* -- on the way back to campus this year. No one was injured,
but it was quite an exciting 20 seconds or so as we skidded on three
points with smoke and sparks exploding out of the left side of the
bus).

> Our contractor described it as having a short-frill, small, rounded
> epoccipitals (those limpet-shaped bones around the edge of the
> frill), no nasal horncore, and, get this, no orbital horncores
> (ie. one above each eye), but rather, one large upwardly pointing
> horn of large proportions which is positioned in between the
> orbits. This horn was damaged by recent erosion.

I'm fairly sure that this is incorrect. It's been a few months since I
last saw an image of the skull, but I believe there was a horn above
each orbit, projecting straight upwards (the tips had been eroded, but
enough of the cores remained to show that there was no apparent
curvature. If this animal was sparring with its horns, it would have
had to hold its nose at a 90-degree angle to the ground; a most
uncomfortable-looking position). I'm not certain about the presence or
absence of a nasal horn or protuberance; I'll try to track down more
information (I've got a lab with the guy tomorrow, so it should be
pretty easy to confirm/deny any info).

> Such a skull sounds to strange to be true, but considering our weird
> Pachyrhinosaurus skulls and Scott Sampson's 2 new genera recently
> described in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, I guess anything is
> possible.

It probably is too weird to be true. I'm 99% sure I'd have remembered
if the thing was a unicorn.

We didn't really find too much of interest this year,
unfortunately. Some nice hadrosaur material, but little else. I did
find some dinosaur eggshell fragments which looked identical to the
hadrosaur stuff I was collecting for Horner in Montana a few years
ago; does anyone know whether dinosaur egg material has been described
from Big Bend before? If not, looks like I'm the first. Woo-hoo! ;)

Dan Lipkowitz

Undergraduate, the University of Chicago
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