PRENOCERATOPS

Formally described by Brenda Chinnery in 2004, Prenoceratops pieganensis belongs to Leptoceratopsidae, the "small horned faces", a group of lightly built, beaked herbivores anchored by Leptoceratops. Unlike the giant, impressively horned-and-frilled neoceratopsids that dominated western North America later in the Cretaceous, Prenoceratops and other leptoceratopsids lack even the faintest whiff of a horn on their faces and carry only a modest frill at the back of the skull. They are small by comparison, though.

In an odd twist of the fossil record, Prenoceratops occupies a unique place in North American neoceratopsian history. Aside from Montanoceratops, which was discovered by Barnum Brown in 1916 and initially described by Brown and Schlaikjer in 1942 as Leptoceratops cerorhynchus, Prenoceratops is perhaps the only basal neoceratopsians known from the continent. But it's also the first basal neoceratopsian recovered from a bonebed, preserving many hundreds of fossils of multiple individuals in a single deposit. Yet that apparent abundance comes with a catch: the bones are so thoroughly scattered and intermixed that researchers cannot confidently reassemble even a single complete skeleton.

All that being said, we know that Prenoceratops was a small and lightly-built dinosaur, reaching roughly 1.5-2 metres in length. Living during the Late Cretaceous around 74-75 million years ago, it was a bipedal animal with long hind limbs, relatively short forelimbs, and a deep, parrot-like beak adapted for cropping tough vegetation, and remained a successful part of its Late Cretaceous Montanan ecosystem even as giant ceratopsians were rising to prominence across Laramidia.