How many of you have heard Wendiceratops?

How many of you have heard Wendiceratops? More importantly, how many of you have heard of paleontologist Wendy Sloboda?

Ms. Sloboda is one of the most accomplished in the field paleontologists in the world. She is responsible for over 300 newly discovered and displayed fossils at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

What she is now most famous for is the ceratopsian that she discovered and is now rightfully named after her by her colleagues. Wendiceratops pinhornenis. Which means “wendy’s horned face”. A hippo sized animal about 6 meters long. living 79 million years ago is what is now southern Alberta, Canada.

Wendiceratops is “one of the most spectacularly adorned species in the horned dinosaur group, and it helps scientists understand the early evolution of skull ornamentation in an iconic group of dinosaurs characterized by their horned faces.

Not only does it tell scientists when the nose horn evolved, the research reveals that an enlarged conical nasal horn arose at least twice in the horned dinosaur family, once the short-frilled Centrosaurinae group that includes Wendiceratops, and again in the long-frilled Chasmosaurinae group which includes Triceratops. “

The discovery is doing wonders for the field of paleontology but more important than the discovery, we would like to all thank Wendy Sloboda for all of her back breaking hard work and patience. Her meticulous and relentlessness efforts are rivaled but no one alive today. She has a nack for Finding fossils.

A little fun fact about her, Ms. Sloboda reserved a spot on her arm for a tattoo hoping that one day she might have a dinosaur named after her. Needless to say it’s an awesome piece of art.

How many of you have seen the Wendiceratops display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto?