Lamaceratops
Encyclopedia
Lamaceratops,"Lama Horned Face", is a dinosaur
Dinosaur
Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals of the clade and superorder Dinosauria. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic period until the end of the Cretaceous , when the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event led to the extinction of...

 from the Late Cretaceous
Cretaceous
The Cretaceous , derived from the Latin "creta" , usually abbreviated K for its German translation Kreide , is a geologic period and system from circa to million years ago. In the geologic timescale, the Cretaceous follows the Jurassic period and is followed by the Paleogene period of the...

 period. It is classified as a ceratopsia
Ceratopsia
Ceratopsia or Ceratopia is a group of herbivorous, beaked dinosaurs which thrived in what are now North America, Europe, and Asia, during the Cretaceous Period, although ancestral forms lived earlier, in the Jurassic. The earliest known ceratopsian, Yinlong downsi, lived between 161.2 and 155.7...

n, a herbivorous "frilled" or armored dinosaur similar to, but smaller than, Bagaceratops
Bagaceratops
Bagaceratops, meaning "small-horned face" , is a genus of ceratopsian dinosaur that lived in what is now Mongolia around 80 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous...

. It had a horn on the front of its face, much like most of the later Ceratopsids.

The fossil
Fossil
Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...

s of Lamaceratops have been found in Mongolia
Mongolia
Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It is bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest...

. The type species is Lamaceratops tereschenkoi. It was first described by Aliafanov in 2003.

Classification

Lamaceratops belonged to Protoceratopsidae within the Ceratopsia (the name is Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

 for "horned face"), a group of herbivorous dinosaurs with parrot
Parrot
Parrots, also known as psittacines , are birds of the roughly 372 species in 86 genera that make up the order Psittaciformes, found in most tropical and subtropical regions. The order is subdivided into three families: the Psittacidae , the Cacatuidae and the Strigopidae...

-like beaks which thrived in North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

 and Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...

 during the Cretaceous Period, which ended roughly 65 million years ago.

Some palaeontologists have classified it as a member of the Bagaceratopidae, a family of several genera closely related to Bagaceratops
Bagaceratops
Bagaceratops, meaning "small-horned face" , is a genus of ceratopsian dinosaur that lived in what is now Mongolia around 80 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous...

. It may be only a variant of Bagaceratops.

Diet

Lamaceratops, like all ceratopsians, was a herbivore
Herbivore
Herbivores are organisms that are anatomically and physiologically adapted to eat plant-based foods. Herbivory is a form of consumption in which an organism principally eats autotrophs such as plants, algae and photosynthesizing bacteria. More generally, organisms that feed on autotrophs in...

. During the Cretaceous, flowering plants were "geographically limited on the landscape", and so it is likely that this dinosaur fed on the predominant plants of the era: ferns, cycads and conifers. It would have used its sharp ceratopsian beak to bite off the leaves or needles.

Links

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