Scientists announce discovery of new dinosaur genus in China

CHINESE scientists have identified a new genus of dinosaur in a mountainous city of the eastern Shandong Province a type of ceratops never found before experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said recently.

Fossils of the dinosaur were unearthed in January 2008 in Zhucheng City, where several Cretaceous dinosaurs have been found since the 1960s, "but was identified only quite recently," said Xu Xing, a renowned dinosaur researcher in China.

Xu, a researcher with CAS Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, has named it "Sinoceratops Zhuchengensis".

"Its skull is at least 180cm long and 105cm wide," said Xu. "It has a 30-cm long horn on its face and at least 10 crooked, smaller horns on the top of its head." Ceratops (meaning "Horned face") were large, plant-eating dinosaurs of the late Cretaceous period that dates to back more than 65 million years ago. The most renowned ceratops is triceratops, a huge herbivore weighing over 10 tonnes.

The discovery of the Zhuchengensis might rewrite current theories on the morphological transition among dinosaurs, Xu said.

"It blurs the distinctions between two types of ceratops," he said. "It bears features of centrosaurus, a group of ceratops, that are smaller in size, but its size resembles chasmosaurus, the giants of ceratops." Before China's finding, ceratops had been unearthed only in western North America.

Xinhua