Question 1

How do you say Diabloceratops?

Accepted Answer

Diabloceratops is pronounced dy-AB-lo-SAIR-ah-tops. Break it into four chunks: dy, then AB with heavy stress, then SAIR with strong stress, then ah-tops at the end. Say it a few times fast and you will get it. The name comes from Spanish and Greek, which is why it sounds a little exotic.

Question 2

What does Diabloceratops mean?

Accepted Answer

Diabloceratops means devil-horned face. The first part, Diablo, is the Spanish word for devil. The middle part, cerat, comes from the Greek word for horn. The ending, ops, means face in Greek. Scientists chose that name because the two tall curved horns on the back of its frill look remarkably like devil horns.

Question 3

How big was Diabloceratops?

Accepted Answer

Diabloceratops grew to about 15 feet long, which is roughly the length of a full-size pickup truck. It weighed around 1,300 kilograms, which is close to the weight of a small car. It was a medium-sized ceratopsian, bigger than a horse but much smaller than its famous cousin Triceratops.

Question 4

When did Diabloceratops live?

Accepted Answer

Diabloceratops lived approximately 81.4 to 81 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous Period. That is tens of millions of years before the asteroid that wiped out the non-bird dinosaurs hit Earth around 66 million years ago. At that time, the area that is now Utah was a warm subtropical floodplain next to an inland sea.

Question 5

Where was Diabloceratops found?

Accepted Answer

The Diabloceratops fossil was discovered in the Wahweap Formation inside Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. This remote stretch of desert badlands is one of the most productive fossil sites in North America. The monument covers nearly 1.9 million acres and has yielded dozens of new dinosaur species over the years.

Question 6

What did Diabloceratops eat?

Accepted Answer

Diabloceratops was a herbivore, meaning it only ate plants. It had a tough, parrot-like beak at the front of its jaws for cropping vegetation, and rows of tightly packed cheek teeth for shearing through tough plant material. It likely fed on ferns, cycads, and low-growing flowering plants that covered the floodplains of what is now Utah.

Question 7

What are those horns on Diabloceratops?

Accepted Answer

The two tall, curving horns that give Diabloceratops its name grew from the back of its large bony neck frill, a structure called the parietal bone. Scientists believe these were mostly display structures used for showing off to rivals and attracting mates, similar to how modern elk use their antlers. They were probably not the animal's primary weapon against predators.

Question 8

Is Diabloceratops related to Triceratops?

Accepted Answer

Yes, Diabloceratops and Triceratops are cousins in the ceratopsian dinosaur family. Diabloceratops belongs to the centrosaurine branch of the group, while Triceratops belongs to the chasmosaurine branch. Both groups share the same basic body plan of four legs, a beak, a frill, and horns, but they evolved their elaborate headgear along slightly different paths.

Question 9

Who discovered Diabloceratops?

Accepted Answer

Diabloceratops was formally described and named by paleontologist James Ian Kirkland and his colleagues in 2010. The fossil was found in the Wahweap Formation in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. The species name, eatoni, honors Jeffrey Eaton, a paleontologist at Weber State University who helped establish the national monument where the fossil was found.

Question 10

Was Diabloceratops dangerous?

Accepted Answer

Diabloceratops was a plant-eater, so it was not a predator. However, a 1,300-kilogram animal with large curved horns and a massive bony frill would have been a seriously dangerous animal to mess with if it felt threatened. Large tyrannosaurs of the Late Cretaceous were probably the main predators that Diabloceratops needed to defend itself against.

Question 11

Why is Diabloceratops important to science?

Accepted Answer

Diabloceratops was a landmark discovery because at the time it was named in 2010, it was the oldest known ceratopsid ever found. It also proved that centrosaurine ceratopsians lived much further south than scientists had previously realized, completely changing our understanding of how these horned dinosaurs spread across North America. It is a key piece of evidence that different dinosaur ecosystems existed in the northern and southern parts of the continent.

Question 12

Did Diabloceratops live with other dinosaurs?

Accepted Answer

Yes, Diabloceratops shared its world with a whole ecosystem of other dinosaurs. The Wahweap Formation of Utah has produced hadrosaurs, ankylosaurs, and tyrannosaurs from roughly the same time period. Scientists believe that southern Utah during the Late Cretaceous had its own unique mix of species that was quite different from the dinosaur communities living further north in Montana and Canada at the same time.

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