Titanoceratops

Skeletal reconstruction of Titanoceratops. The skeleton was originally assigned to the genus Pentaceratops.

• New Mexico

Titanoceratops ( " Great -horned face " ) is a genus of bird Beck dinosaurs from the group of Ceratopsidae within the ceratopsians that lived during the Late Cretaceous (late Campanian ).

Titanoceratops was described in 2011 by Nicholas R. Long Rich on the basis of a fossil that was originally assigned to the genus Pentaceratops. The partial skeleton was recovered in 1941 in New Mexico from the Kirtland Formation in what is now New Mexico. The type species and only species is Titanoceratops ouranos.

Features

Titanoceratops had a 2.4 -meter-long skull and was significantly greater than Pentaceratops, he also had a longer nose, slightly longer horns and a thinner bone crest on the back of the head.

With an estimated weight of 6.5 up to 7 tons it weighed twice as much as an adult Pentaceratops, making it one of the largest dinosaurs of the North American Campanian. Its total length was approximately 8 meters.

System

A cladistic analysis showed that Titanoceratops is the sister species of a clade of Eotriceratops, Triceratops and Torosaurus. The tribes of this gigantic Ceratopsiden that Triceratopsini, possibly developed during the Campanian to the south of North America, five million years earlier than previously thought, and spread during the Maastrichtian across the continent.