By Jack Wood on @thewoodparable
PLEASE support us on Patreon! We really do need all of your support to keep this blog running - any amount helps!
Name: Foraminacephale brevis
Name Meaning: Foramina Head
Described By: Schott & Evans
Classification: Dinosauria, Ornithischia, Genasauria, Neornithischia, Cerapoda, Marginocephalia, Pachycephalosauria, Pachycephalosauridae, Pachycephalosaurinae
Foraminacephale is a very recently described genus of Chunkie that has brought to light a completely new group of them. Essentially, two groups of Pachycephalosaurs have now come to light: the “Stegocerines”, a group including Stegoceras, Hanssuesia, and Colepiocephale; and the Pachycephalosaurines, a group including everything else. It is known from the domes of multiple individuals and, unlike in most Pachycephalosaurs, it actually had slight doming of the skull in presumed juvenile individuals. This has allowed it to be differentiated from Stegoceras, though the authors treated “Dracorex” and “Stygimoloch” as distinct genera rather than as ontogenetic stages of Pachycephalosaurus, which may have affected the phylogenetic analysis of this taxon - especially since the tree wasn’t particularly stable thanks to the incomplete nature of Chunkie remains, to begin with. Still, it does seem likely that Foraminacephale is its own genus. Specimens of this genus have been found in multiple formations: the Dinosaur Park Formation, the Horseshoe Canyon Formation, and the Oldman Formation, all in Alberta, Canada. It lived about 77 to 73 million years ago, in the Campanian age of the Late Cretaceous.
Schott, R. K, D. C. Evans. 2016. Cranial variation and systematics of Foraminacephale brevis gen. nov. and the diversity of pachycephalosaurid dinosaurs (Ornithischia: Cerapoda) in the Belly River Group of Alberta, Canada. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. doi:10.1111/zoj.12465.
Shout out goes to @actually-an-elf!
