HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — Harrisburg University Professor Dr. Steven Jasinski and a group of researchers recently named and described a newly discovered horned dinosaur species, which for Jasinski is the second dinosaur naming in the last year.
Dr. Jasinski joined researchers from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, as well as the University of Bath, to help name Sierraceratops turneri, discovered in New Mexico and said to have live 72 million years ago.
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The horned dinosaur is described to be a large, four-legged herbivore with long horns, a beaked face and a frilled head. The most popular member of the group is Triceratops, which came six million years after Sierraceratops turneri.
Its skull measured about five feet long and its body came in around 15 feet long, similar size of a rhinoceros.
The bones were found in Late Cretaceous rocks of the Hall Lake Formation near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico on a reach owned by CNN founder Ted Turner.
The team reported these findings in a paper in the “Cretaceous Research” journal.
“Sierraceratops was collected from a layer of rocks that has been understudied as far as its fossils and dinosaur fauna,” Dr. Jasinski said. “When we spend more time researching and collecting in understudied strata like this, we find that different rocks often have distinct dinosaurs, and these dinosaur communities are frequently unique, particularly if they are from different times or ages.”
Dr. Jasinski is a professor in Harrisburg University’s Department of Environmental Science and Sustainability.
This is the seventh dinosaur species he has named.