New dinosaurian royalty crowned - meet Regaliceratops

Horned dinosaur from Canada sports a 'crown' on the frill and reveals a unique evolutionary pattern

Tyrannosaurus is known as the tyrant king, but palaeontologists have generally refrained from naming other dinosaurian royalty until now. Regaliceratops whose name translates as 'royal horned face' is a horned dinosaur from Alberta, Canada and has been named in a paper published last night. Like all of the horned dinosaurs, it has a number of horns on its face but also sports a frill of bone extending from the back of the skull that fans out behind the head. In Regaliceratops this frill is both large and has unusual pentagonal plates arranged around the edge, giving it something of a crown-like appearance. The name also commemorates the fact that 2015 marks the 30th anniversary of the opening of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta where the specimen resides.

The specimen of Regaliceratops is very well preserved - many ceratopsians suffer damage to the frill as despite the size, they are typically thin sheets of bone and therefore rather fragile, and so this fossil is especially impressive. However, it is the pattern of the horns and the shape of the frill that make this animal especially interesting from an evolutionary perspective. Regaliceratops is a close relative of the famous Triceratops and a detailed study of the anatomy of these animals shows that they show a close ancestry, however in some major ways Regaliceratops is a very unusual animal, and has the face of another dinosaur.