World's Largest Horned Dinosaur Found

Nov. 28, 2007 -- Canadian paleontologists have unearthed the world's largest known horned dinosaur with the discovery of an early relative of Triceratops that measured around 30 feet in length, or the size of an enormous SUV.

The previous record-holder was Pentaceratops sternbergi, which hailed from what is now New Mexico.

The new dinosaur, Eotriceratops ("early Triceratops") xerinsularis, is the earliest known confirmed relative of the rhino-like Triceratops, which was slightly smaller in size, with the largest specimens measuring just over 29 feet in length.

"The skull of Eotriceratops alone was as big as a car," said David Eberth, who co-authored a paper on the find in a recent Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.

Eberth, a senior scientist at Alberta's Royal Tyrrell Museum, collaborated with other Royal Tyrrell scientists and researchers from the Canadian Museum of Nature to unearth the horned beast, which lived 68 million years ago.

With much heaving and hauling, they excavated its bones at Horseshoe Canyon Formation in Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park in central Alberta.

Eberth told Discovery News that another paleontologist had spotted the skeleton in 1910, but he decided not to dig it up.

"At the site the skeleton looked like road kill," Eberth said. "Really, it looked like it had been run over by a Cretaceous Hummer."

After extensive analysis and bone assembly, the Canadian team now knows what the new dino looked like when it was alive.

Like Triceratops, it possessed two orbital bone horns that jutted out above its eyes. Each would have been 5 feet long. A smaller, pyramid-shaped, horn stuck out from its nose.