Pachyrhinosaurus — the thick-nosed ceratopsian that swapped horns for bone

When and where

Pachyrhinosaurus lived roughly 73 to 69 million years ago in what is now western North America. Its fossils come from the Canadian province of Alberta and the US state of Alaska, sites that lay on a coastal plain bordering a shallow inland sea during the Late Cretaceous. Several species occupied different parts of this range.

How we know

In 1946, Canadian palaeontologist Charles M. Sternberg unearthed the first Pachyrhinosaurus fossils in Alberta. He named the genus in 1950. Since then, over a dozen partial skulls and a large collection of other bones have turned up in Alberta and Alaska. Many specimens sat unstudied in museum drawers until the 1980s, when renewed work triggered a surge in knowledge about this animal. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachyrhinosaurus

What set it apart

Unlike Triceratops and its other ceratopsid cousins, Pachyrhinosaurus carried a thick, flat nasal boss made of solid bone rather than a long nose horn. The skull also bore a pair of curved horns above the eyes, with smaller spikes and ornamentation decorating the neck frill towards the back. The body was stocky and heavy, built low to the ground for grazing on tough vegetation. Several species are known, distinguished mainly by the shape of the nasal boss and frill details.

For collectors and classrooms

A Pachyrhinosaurus figurine fills a gap that most dinosaur toy lines skip: a ceratopsian without the usual three-horn profile. Models capture the distinctive boss and frill spikes that make this genus so different from its horned relatives. Browse Pachyrhinosaurus figures on Amazon