Special Announcement

Scientists Discover New Species of Horned Dinosaur from Specimens Uncovered in London Museum Collections

A new horned dinosaur has been discovered after researchers analyzed specimens that had been untouched and overlooked for nearly a century in the Natural History Museum's collections in London. The new dinosaur species, Spinops sternbergorum, lived during the Late Cretaceous period, between 74 to 76 million years ago. The specimen is named and described in research published in the Polish journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

Spinops sternbergorum was about the size of a large bull.  It weighed more than 1 ton and measured 20 feet long. The plant-eating dinosaur's face ended in a beak-like mouth that would have been able to shear through woody plants that probably made up much of its diet. The large, shield-like frill that extended from the back of the skull of Spinops sternbergorum had a mixture of ornamentation that resembles two other horned dinosaurs known from the region, Centrosaurus and Styracosaurus, which are the closest relatives to Spinops. Like Centrosaurus, Spinops had a pair of large, banana-shaped hooks that curled forward over the frill and, like Styracosaurus, it also had a pair of large, straight spikes set close to the midline that pointed backwards.

The fossils were collected in 1916 from a bonebed in the area now known as Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada.  The new dinosaur was identified from fossil material of several individuals that contained parts of two skulls, including most of the face and large sections of the head frill.

When the specimens were collected by Charles H. Sternberg and his son Levi Sternberg, who were contracted by the British Museum (Natural History) (now the Natural History Museum), London, A. Smith Woodward (then Keeper of Geology at the museum) was greatly disappointed with the quality of the specimens.  An unsigned letter to Sternberg in the Natural History Museum archives, dated 11 January 1918, dismissed the fossils as "nothing but rubbish . . ." Consequently, most of the material remained overlooked and unprepared for over 90 years. However, re-examination of the collection led several of the authors to conclude that the fossils might represent a new taxon, providing the impetus to fully prepare the specimens.

"This discovery is significant because it adds to our knowledge of horned dinosaur diversity in the Late Cretaceous," said Dr. Michael Ryan, curator of vertebrate paleontology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History (Ohio, USA). "Natural selection appears to have acted exclusively on the ornamentation on the head in these dinosaurs such that new species are appearing at a very high rate in this group—less than one-half million years." Ryan was second author on the research. He initiated the research project in 2000.

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Press release

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Watch a video of Dr. Ryan discussing Spinops.