Zuniceratops

Zuniceratops ('Zuni-horned face') was a ceratopsian dinosaur from the mid Turonian of the Late Cretaceous Period of what is now New Mexico, United States. It lived about 10 million years earlier than the more familiar horned Ceratopsidae and provides an important window on their ancestry.

Zuniceratops appears to have been roughly 3 to 3.5 meters long (10-11 ft) and three feet (one meter) tall at the hips. It probably weighed 100 to 150 kilograms (200 to 250 lb), making it substantially smaller than most Ceratopsidae. The skull bears a well-developed pair of brow horns, similar to those of chasmosaurs and primitive centrosaurs, but the nose horn is absent. The brow horns are thought to have grown much larger with age. The snout is long and low, like that of chasmosaurines. The frill was a thin, broad, shield-like structure. It bore a pair of large holes but lacked epoccipital bones, as in Protoceratops. Overall, the anatomy is much more primitive than that of the ceratopsids, but more advanced than in protoceratopsids.