LOS ANGELES (LALATE) – The Spinops Sternbergorum (photos below) new dinosaur species has been discovered. The Spinops Sternbergorum is a new horned dinosaur species the size of a bull, which lived during the Late Cretaceous period, and is from the same family as the Triceratops. Bones from the Spinops Sternbergorum were obtained from a bone bed in 1916 located in Alberta, Canada. So how did it get “discovered” just recently?

Spinops Sternbergorum was discovered by a research team led by Dr Andrew Farke. Dr Andrew Farke was fascinated by the bone bed. In 1916, Museum’s Keeper of Geology categorized numerous bones in the bed as simply “rubbish”. So for more than a century, researchers accepted that determination and categorization as true.

Dr. Farke questioned that. He began to examine bones in the Natural History Museum collections archives (from the bed) that remained untouched for decades. Soon after, he discovered a series of bones they were different than anything he had ever seen.

Spinops Sternbergorum Pictures (Illustrations)
Spinops Sternbergorum Photo 1
Spinops Sternbergorum Photo 2
Spinops Sternbergorum Photo 3
Spinops Sternbergorum Photo 4

In a news statement this week, Farke says “Here we have not just one, but multiple individuals of the same species, so we’re confident that it’s not just an odd example of a previously known species.”

The plant-eating dinosaurs weighed more than 1 ton. Its stood more than twenty feet long. Researchers believe it bares a resemblance to Centrosaurus and Styracosaurus. Now researchers are wondering what else is in the archives from the bone bed.

The fossil material was recovered from the Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada in 1916. A. Smith Woodward (aka Arthur Smith Woodward) was the Keeper of Geology. The fossils in the bone bed were recovered that year by Charles H. Sternberg and his son Levi Sternberg. They were hired by the then British Museum. But Woodward wrote Sternberg in the Natural History Museum on January 11, 1918 that the bone bed was “nothing but rubbish”.

Spinops sternbergorum is detailed extensively by Michael J. Ryan, curator and head of vertebrate paleontology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, in a new journal publication for Acta Palaeontologica Polonica December 6, 2011. For more click HERE.