Kosmoceratops

Chapter • Meet the dinosaur

Overview

Kosmoceratops richardsoni is one of the most ornately decorated dinosaurs ever found. It was a chasmosaurine horned dinosaur roughly four to five metres long and estimated at somewhere around one to one and a half tonnes. The body was heavily built and fully quadrupedal, with a barrel-shaped ribcage, short sturdy limbs and a parrot-like beak at the front of the jaws. The head is what makes it famous: researchers count fifteen horns and horn-like structures. A small horn sat on the nose, one above each eye, one on each cheek bone, and ten hook-shaped processes lined the rim of the neck frill. Unlike Triceratops, the brow horns swept outwards to the sides, and the frill itself was broad, short and folded downwards along its edge like a row of curled hooks.

Chapter • Where it lived

Habitat

Kosmoceratops lived about 76.4–75.5 million years ago, in the late Campanian stage of the Cretaceous. Its fossils come from the Kaiparowits Formation in Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, southern Utah, USA. At that time the region lay on the eastern shore of Laramidia, the western landmass created when the Western Interior Seaway cut North America in half. The setting was a warm, wet, seasonally rainy coastal plain with braided rivers, wetlands, swamp forests and dense stands of conifers, ferns and early flowering plants. Kosmoceratops shared this world with hadrosaurs such as Gryposaurus, the closely related Utahceratops, armoured dinosaurs, crocodilians, turtles and tyrannosaurids like Teratophoneus.

Chapter • Wild behavior

Behavior & Ecology

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Chapter • Scientific place

Taxonomy