New Texas Ceratopsians

["D. Tanke" <dtanke@dns.magtech.ab.ca>]

 Greetings from snowy Alberta, where it has snowed for 2 days and is
to continue doing so for the next 4-5 days.

 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. 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.

 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.

 At Dinofest, Tom Lehman mentioned to me he is describing a new
ceratopsian skull recovered from Texas, and that the paper will appear
in a fall 1996 issue of Journal of Paleontology. His description was
very different from the Sereno find. So, it seems we have 2 new
ceratopsians from Texas.

 Anyone out there know more about this new skull?

   
 Darren Tanke, Technician I, Dinosaur Research Program, Royal Tyrrell
Museum of Palaeontology, Drumheller, AB, Canada. Paleo Interests:
fossil identification, collection and preparation, centrosaurine
ceratopsians, Upper Cretaceous vertebrate faunas of North America and
East Asia, paleopathology; senior editor on annotated bibliography of
extinct/extant vertebrate dental pathology, osteopathy and related
topics (9,657 entries as of April 14, 1996).

Osteopathy Bibliography Homepage at: http://dns.magtech.ab.ca/dtanke