Nasutuceratops Titusi

        Hey guys, today's post is about the recently discovered Nasutuceratops!

        Nasutuceratops was a Late Cretaceous dinosaur belonging to the family ceratopsidae, the same family as the famous Triceratops. The animal was about 4 meters long, 1.5 meters tall, and a ton in weight. It was discovered in Utah, which was, during the Cretaceous period, an enormous area of swamp land. This ceratopsid made a bit of a stir in the media thanks to its unusual name, which translates from latin to mean "Big nose horned face." However it is not the dinosaur's nose that is most peculiar, many other members of this family such as Pachyrhinosaurus had similar large sets of nares. It is the horns that make Nasutuceratops unique. Here's a comparison with Triceratops, see if you can spot it.

I drew those arrows myself. I'm so talented.

        It's the horns. Nasutuceratops had horns that, unlike the rest of its family, stuck horizontally down its face. These horns are confusing, since unlike other ceratopsids, they could not use them as self defense. On Triceratops, for example, the horns are pointing up, so if there was a large predator like a Tyrannosaurus, it would be able to thrust out its head and gore the enemy. Nasutuceratops' horns are not at an angle that would allow it to gore anything, and even if it tried to attack something lower down, its beak would get in the way. In my opinion, Nasutuceratops' genus probably evolved to have more head butting contests than its evolutionary siblings, contests in which large forward pointing horns could be broken or damaged. These flatter-to-the-face horns would also help to cushion blows when ramming each other. In this manner, they would be more like a Pachycephalosaurus in their mating and territorial disputes, rather than the rutting behavior scientists believe other members of ceratopsidae would have engaged in.

    (click to enlarge)

   And that about wraps up today's entry. Next time it will probably be an ammonite or something. I haven't done one of them yet.

-Athos

For this one:

http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/ref/collection/etd3/id/528

Brachiosaurus

Hello comrades, today we'll be covering a better known dinosaur, brachiosaurus.

        Brachiosaurus was a late Jurassic sauropod. It was first discovered during Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh's famous "Bone Wars." Marsh discovered a skull of the beast in Colorado, and from this one bone he eagerly classified it as a new species in an attempt to beat out Cope. He then proceeded to idiotically place the skull on the body of an apatosaurus and call it a brontosaurus, opening a sardine can of confusion in nomenclature that would carry on even until today. Congratulations on your fantastic legacy marsh.

         Brachiosaurus would've fed on leaves from the tallest of trees. It was able to reach them thanks to its enormous 32 foot long neck. The neck was so huge that each vertebrae was 3ft and 3in in length. This isthmus of an esophagus would allow it to reach higher than any other known organism. This neck was also incredibly heavy, so brachiosaurus needed some of the strongest front legs in the animal kingdom to keep it up. These front legs were noticeably longer than the back, and this sauropod needed the strong limbs to keep its body from collapsing, so Jurassic Park's famous bipedal brachiosaur is a little inaccurate.

        Another striking feature of brachiosaurus, as you can see from the good doctor up there, was it's head crest. A wall of bone ran down the middle of the dinosaur's head, separating the nasal cavities. These huge nostrils would perhaps given the beast a good sense of smell, although what it would use this sensitivity for is unknown. 

       And that's it for today, next time will be about nasutoceratops, which will also be the blog's first ceratopsid.

- Athos

Palmer, Douglas, Simon Lamb, Guerrero Angeles. Gavira, and Peter Frances. Prehistoric Life: [the Definitive Visual History of Life on Earth]. New York, NY: DK Pub., 2009. Print.

(MLA format is just my favorite thing ever)