A new member joins the Triceratops family species, and the horned dinosaur was discovered at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, according to a press release.
The findings were published on Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The dinosaur species called "Nasutoceratops titusi" measured about 15 feet in length and weighed 2.5 tons, and was a plant-eater.
The dinosaur lived in the region about 76 million years ago, during the Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous period.
"Nasutoceratops translates as "big-nose horned face," and the second part of the name honors Alan Titus, Monument Paleontologist at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, for his years of research collaboration," the National History Museum of Utah said in a statement,
Horned dinosaurs, also known as "ceratopsids" had large skulls, one horn over the nose, and one horn over each eye. These ceratposids are different from their Triceratops relatives because they have an oversized nose and extraordinarily long "forward-oriented horns" over their eyes.
"The jumbo-sized schnoz of Nasutoceratops likely had nothing to do with a heightened sense of smell-since olfactory receptors occur further back in the head, adjacent to the brain-and the function of this bizarre feature remains uncertain," Scott Sampson of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, who is also the study's lead author, said in a statement.
Researchers say that the dinosaur used its horns and frills to attract mates and intimidate the opposite sex.
"The amazing horns of Nasutoceratops were most likely used as visual signals of dominance and, when that wasn't enough, as weapons for combatting rivals," Mark Loewen, a researcher at the Natural History Museum of Utah, said.
Nasutoceratops lived at a time when other closely-related horned dinosaurs lived in Alberta, a province of Canada, the study said.
"Today, thanks to an abundant fossil record and more than a century of collecting by paleontologists, Laramidia is the best known major landmass for the entire Age of Dinosaurs, with dig sites spanning from Alaska to Mexico," a statement from the Natural History Museum of Utah, said.
