The paleontologist Nicholas Longrich has discovered a new species of dinosaur with a heart-shaped structure on its head at the Museum of Natural History in New York (USA). And he has named it Mojoceratops peripania .
The reptile, belonging to the family of ceratopsids (Ceratopsidae), lived 75 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous . A close cousin of the Triceratops , it was the size of a hippopotamus and fed on plants. The highlight of her physiognomy is a lush bony structure on her head in the shape of a heart . " Mojo is an African-American word that means talisman, and it refers to an element used to attract members of the opposite sex," explains Longrich, who has published his finding in the Journal of Paleontology . "This dinosaur probably used the 'ornament' to find a mate, so the name Mojoceratops makes sense," he adds. The epithet peripania means 'pride' in Greek.
Before Longrich found and thoroughly studied its fossil remains, the species had been mistakenly identified as a Chasmosaurus , a species with a prominent horn and a very similar skull.
