﻿ Avaceratops


Speculative reconstruction of live Avaceratops

  • USA
  • A. lammersi Dodson, 1986

Avaceratops is a little known species of bird Beck dinosaurs from the group of Ceratopsidae within the ceratopsians.


From Avaceratops only two poorly preserved skull and partial skeleton preserved body are known to date. The findings come from sub-adult ( adolescent ) animals that were around 2.5 meters long - the length of adult animals is not known.

The physique resembled the stocky trunk, powerful limbs and massive head that of the other Ceratopsidae. The nasal bone and the postorbital are not obtained, accordingly, also make no precise data on nasal or supraorbital horns. The neck shield was formed as with all Ceratopsidae from the parietal and squamosal. He was compared to other Ceratopsidae very short.

Discovery and designation

The fossil remains of Avaceratops were found in the Judith River Formation in Montana, USA, and first described in 1986. The genus name is derived from " Ava ", the wife of the finder of the remains of the first name, and keratops (Greek for " horn face" ), a common name component of the ceratopsians, from. Type species and only known species is A. lammersi. The finds are (late Campanian ) dated to the Late Cretaceous to an age 76-72 million years.


Avaceratops one of the Ceratopsidae, the young age of the animals found and the lack of diagnostic key bones make a more systematic classification difficult. Dodson et al. (2004) to see if one belonging to the Centrosaurinae due to the construction of the shed bone and the premaxillary bone. Another study, however, comes to the conclusion Avaceratops have expressed a primitive position within the Ceratopsidae and form a transitional form between the two subfamilies Centrosaurinae and Chasmosaurinae.