Titanoceratops ouranos
By José Carlos Cortés on @ryuukibart
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Name: Titanoceratops ouranos
Name Meaning: Titanic Horn Face
First Described: 2011
Described By: Longrich
Classification: Dinosauria, Ornithischia, Genasauria, Neornithischia, Cerapoda, Marginocephalia, Ceratopsia, Neoceratopsia, Coronosauria, Ceratopsoidea, Ceratopsidae, Chasmosaurinae, Triceratopsini
Titanoceratops is a Triceratopsin which may have had the longest skull of any land vertebrate, at 2.65 meters long. It’s entire body was about 6.8 meters long, making it an extremely large Ceratopsian, similar to Triceratops and Torosaurus. It was also very closely related to both, and is known from a partial skeleton and mostly complete skull. It is known from either the Kirtland or Fruitland Formations, the exact formation being unknown due to the Quarry being lost. Either way, it lived about 74 to 73 million years ago, in the Campanian age of the Late Cretaceous.
By Mariana Ruiz Villarreal, in the Public Domain
Titanoceratops was extremely similar to Eotriceratops and Ojoceratops, which lived at the same time; given the hypothesis that the short-frilled Triceratopsins were simply subadult forms of the longer-frilled forms like Titanoceratops, this seems fairly likely. More histological studies of the growth stages of Triceratopsins is necessary, of course, before this can be corroborated; I’ll be going over the “Toroceratops” controversy in the Torosaurus and Triceratops entries (though, just for the record: if Triceratops is a subadult form of Torosaurus, Triceratops was named first and would take priority. So Triceratops would stay, and Torosaurus would no longer be a valid name.) Still, Eotriceratops and Ojoceratops are both somewhat younger than Titanoceratops, so there is some doubt to the claim of their synonymy.
By Jack Wood on @thewoodparable
No matter which formation it lived in, Titanoceratops would have lived alongside a wide variety of dinosaurs such as Bistahieversor, which may have fed upon it; Saurornitholestes, Paronychodon, Anasazisaurus, Parasaurolophus, Stegoceras, Nodocephalosaurus, and Pentaceratops. It was originally thought to be a species of Pentaceratops before being separated out from it. Titanoceratops is also unique in its size by showing that large Ceratopsians were evolving earlier than the time of Triceratops and Torosaurus, and also does close at least a little of the gap between these forms in the evolutionary tree.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanoceratops
Shout out goes to @existential-dinosaur!
