Cerasinops

Cerasinops Temporal range: Late Cretaceous
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Reptilia
Superorder:	Dinosauria
Order:	Ornithischia
Suborder:	Cerapoda
Infraorder:	Ceratopsia
Family:	?Leptoceratopsidae
Genus:	Cerasinops
Species:	C. hodgskissi
Binomial name
Cerasinops hodgskissi Chinnery & Horner, 2007

Cerasinops (meaning 'lesser horned face') was a small ceratopsian dinosaur. It lived during the Campanian of the late Cretaceous Period. Its fossils have been found in Two Medicine Formation, in Montana.

Cerasinops was named and described by Brenda Chinnery and Jack Horner in 2007 from a specimen (MOR 300) almost 80% complete. Cerasinops belonged to the Ceratopsia (the name is Ancient Greek for 'horned face'), a group of herbivorous dinosaurs with parrot-like beaks that thrived in North America and Asia during the Cretaceous Period. Within this group, it has been placed as a basal member of Neoceratopia, although the description is variable; at one point, it is explicitly assigned to Leptoceratopsidae, but in others, it is considered a sister taxon to Leptoceratopsidae, or as a neoceratopsian in general.^[1]

The type species of the genus Cerasinops is C. hodgskissi.

References

1. ^ Chinnery, Brenda J.; and Horner, John R. (2007). "A new neoceratopsian dinosaur linking North American and Asian taxa". Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 27 (3): 625–641. doi:10.1671/0272-4634(2007)27[625:ANNDLN]2.0.CO;2. 

External links

• "Missing Link" Dinosaur Discovered in Montana, a National Geographic article; the photographed skeleton is actually from Montanoceratops.

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