A British scientist didn't have to trek through the desert to discover a new dinosaur species. In fact, its fossils were already stored in a Canadian museum. It's called Pentaceratops aquilonius, a smaller cousin of Triceratops that was about the size of a buffalo. Nick Longrich might have also discovered a second new species, a cousin of the 15-horned Kosmoceratops, but needs more complete fossils to confirm it.
Longrich, a paleontologist at the University of Bath, came upon the fossilized bones at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, where they had been stored for more than 75 years. Scientists initially believed the bones belonged to two other species of dinosaur, Anchiceratops and Chasmosaurus, thatroamed Canada around 75 million years ago, near the end of the Cretaceous Period. Longrich studied the skeletons and determined that they were more similar to dinosaurs that lived in the American Southwest. Longrich's findings were published in the journal Cretaceous Research.
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