Stubs resembling devil's horns above the Regaliceratops' eyes helped inspire the nickname Hellboy, which the animal shares with a two-horned comic-book superhero. Hellboy came to light thanks to amateur fossil hunter Peter Hews, who in 2005 saw a patch of dark stone on a riverbank in Alberta.(Photo: Courtesy of Royal Tyrrell Museum, Drumheller, Alberta.)
The latest new dinosaur – a beast with a corona of bone atop its enormous face<span style="color: Red;">*</span>–<span style="color: Red;">*</span>has an august scientific title based on Greek and Latin roots. But researchers call it something else: Hellboy.
The animal earned its impolite nickname thanks to the "devilishly hard" labor of extracting its skull from a bed of ultra-hard rock just above a river, says Darren Tanke of Canada's Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, who worked on the excavation and coined the dinosaur's moniker.
Stubs resembling devil's horns above the dinosaur's eyes also helped inspire the nickname, which the animal shares with a two-horned comic-book superhero.
No run-of-the-mill devil, the Hellboy dinosaur was more of a demon king. Besides its satanic horns, it boasted a crown-like ring of bony plates across its forehead, inspiring the first part of its scientific name,
Regaliceratops, which means "royal horned-face."
Hellboy came to light thanks to amateur fossil hunter Peter Hews, who in 2005 saw a patch of dark stone on a riverbank in Alberta. Someone else would've passed it by. Hews, a consultant geologist, thought it might be bone and sent Tanke a photo. It was a good call. The second part of Hellboy's scientific name is
peterhewsi, after the man who spotted it.
"I've done the easy part. I just found it," Hews says modestly.
Whether finding it was easy or not, the next part was a lot harder. Researchers needed an electric jackhammer to chisel the fossil out its resting place and a helicopter to lift the 1,300-pound stone block to a truck.
In the workshop, sections of the fossil crumbled into sediment as fine as "hot-chocolate powder," says Tanke, who spent 17 months freeing Hellboy from its jacket of rock.
Once Tanke had liberated the fossil, it was a beauty. The enormous skull, measuring nearly five feet long, was clearly that of a new species, a vegetarian relative of Triceratops that lived some 70 million years ago. It was roughly as big as a rhinoceros – so big that even a T. rex was no threat to an adult Regaliceratops, says Royal Tyrrell curator Donald Henderson.
Hellboy's charms included a giant horn above its nose and that saw-toothed crown, which Henderson says was probably brightly colored. The researchers think it was a signaling device, conveying messages such as "I'm a big male, and you should mate with me!" says study author Caleb Brown, a Royal Tyrrell researcher.
None of Hellboy's close relatives have similar head ornaments, which resemble those of a completely different branch of horned dinosaurs. That shows "we don't know as much about these animals as we thought," Brown says. "There are surprises still to be found."
" 'This is weird' – that's been pretty much everyone's reaction," agrees paleontologist Andrew Farke of California's Raymond Alf Museum of Paleontology.
The dinosaur isn't the only unusual feature of Brown and Donaldson's study, published in this week's
Current Biology. Tucked into the article's fine print is a marriage proposal from Brown to Royal Tyrrell colleague Lorna O'Brien. Brown popped the question in this very public forum because the study will be read for decades to come. Fortunately, she said yes.
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