Horned dinosaur named after amateur Alberta fossil hunter

A spectacular new horned dinosaur discovered in southern Alberta has been named after the fossil hunter who found it.

ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM Scientists have discovered a new horned dinosaur collected from a bone bed in southern Alberta. Wendiceratops is one of the oldest known members of the family that includes triceratops.The Wendiceratops pinhornensis, which was about six metres long, was found in a bone bed near Milk River by Alberta photographer Wendy Sloboda in 2010.

“I was out looking for dinosaurs and found the dinosaur bones. I knew there were lots of skull bones,” Sloboda said. “They were really distinctive so I collected it and brought it back and showed it to (paleontologists) Michael (Ryan) and David (Evans) the next summer when they came out.

“They said, ‘Oh, this is something different.’ ”

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Over the next three years, the scientists and their teams dug a huge hole — removing 25 metres of rock — and found more than 200 bones of four dinosaurs: two adults, a sub-adult and a baby.

They described the newly discovered dinosaur in a paper published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE.

“It’s another pretty spectacular horned dinosaur from Alberta,” said Evans, co-author of the paper and the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

The dinosaur, which lived 79 million years ago, is one of the oldest known members of the family of horned dinosaurs that includes the well-known triceratops.

“Horned dinosaurs are characterized by the shape and size and arrangement of these hooks and horns that project off their face and off of their neck shields,” Evans said.

“Wendiceratops, given its age and the incredible development of these horns off the skull, gives us a lot of new information about the early evolution of these skull ornaments that really characterize this iconic group of dinosaurs.”

The name Wendiceratops (Wendi + ceratops) means “Wendy’s horned face” and acknowledges Sloboda’s work.

“She’s an amazing fossil finder; she’s a legend in Alberta,” said Evans, noting Sloboda found the first dinosaur nesting sites as a teenager and has found hundreds of important fossils in the province since then. “She just has a sixth sense for it.

“We often joke that we are Wendy’s cleanup crew.”

Sloboda said she has been looking for fossils and other artifacts since she was a child. “It’s fun,” she said. Now 47, Sloboda said she’s honoured to have a dinosaur named after her — so much so that she got a tattoo with the drawing of her namesake last Thursday.

“Usually, it’s the second name they name after you,” she said, “but the first one, that’s the exciting part.

“It really caught me off guard.”