New ‘Hellboy’ dinosaur species discovered

“Surprise! You thought I was a red-faced demon with a big gun, didn'tcha?”

 

A new horned dinosaur has been discovered by scientists and they’ve decided to nickname it Hellboy. The study describing the dinosaur is published in the journal Current Biology.

 

Why Hellboy? Study leader Caleb Brown, paleontologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta, Canada, told National Geographic that, “There are these really stubby horns over the eyes that match up with the comic book character Hellboy.”

“Nah, that would be me.”
 

The skull of the new dinosaur species (official name Regaliceratops peterhewsi) was discovered in Canada’s St. Mary River Formation. Based on the nearly-complete skull, R. peterhewsi had small horns above its eyes, a horn on its snout, and a large elaborate frill around its head.

 

What’s interesting about R. peterhewsi is that it’s an example of evolutionary convergence in horned dinosaurs (ceratopsids). R. peterhewsi is a chasmosaurine ceratopsid, belonging to the same group as the more well-known Triceratops. However, R. peterhewsi’s frill more closely resembles the frill of another group of ceratopsids, the centrosaurines.

 

Chasmosaurs lived around 68 million years ago, millions of years after the centrosaurs died out. The researchers hypothesize that this is an example of convergent evolution—when two species evolve similar traits because they live in similar conditions.

Marriage proposal
 

And that’s not the only interesting thing in the study. Retraction Watch spotted something in the acknowledgements section: one of the authors, Caleb Brown, also from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, proposed to his girlfriend.

Happily enough, she said yes. — Bea Montenegro/TJD, GMA News