Alberta teacher discovers new dinosaur species near Grande Prairie

The discovery of a new dinosaur species near Grande Prairie has set Alberta’s paleological community abuzz and will likely enhance our evolutionary understanding of a long-dead species.

Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai—named lakustai for Al Lakusta, the retired Alberta teacher who first unearthed the bone bed containing the species in the 1970s—lived around 72 million years ago and is now one of two species of Pachyrhinosaurus known to scientists.

The new species is a ceratopsian the size of a modern rhinosaurus. Ceratopsians are quadrapedal, beak-mouthed dinosaurs, the most well-known of which is the triceratops. Lakustai differs from the triceratops in that it has a several bizarre horns extending backwards from the frill on its skull and a series of small forward facing horns on its forehead, brow, and nose.

“Whenever you find a new species of dinosaur it’s noteworthy,” said Phillip Currie, paleontologist and Canada Research Chair of Dinosaur Paleobiology at the University of Alberta.

“You think, ‘well there are so many dinosaur species now, how many more can we get?’ But the reality is that I doubt we know more than half of a per cent of the number of dinosaur species that actually lived.”

What makes lakustai so important, he explained, is that it appears to be a less-evolved version of the other known Pachyrhinosaurus species, Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis, which is thought to have lived several million years after lakustai.

“[Lakustai] has very close relatives in southern Alberta all the way up to Alaska. These are related species, yet they’re quite different. They’re starting to fall into a logical sequence where we can actually see the evolution of these animals,” Currie explained.

“From this, we can look at the paleoecology of dinosaurs and the transition of dinosaurs over time. They speciate and change just like modern species. Every time we find a new species, it helps clarify aspects of those ecosystems.”

The find is also significant for another reason: its sheer size. The bone bed in which lakustai was found contains an estimated 27 animals. Currie, along with other paleobiologists involved in the excavation, believe that the bed contains a herd or family group that was trapped in a mudslide or flashflood.

The size of the bed means that in one swoop, scientists have obtained a broad spectrum of individuals, providing them with evidence of a herding lifestyle as well as a greater sample of individuals from which to make assumptions about the creatures’ anatomy.

“In that one bone bed we have babies and adults so we can look at the differences between juveniles and adults, and possibly even males and females. So far we’ve only excavated three to five per cent of the bone bed,” Currie stated.

Despite having only uncovered a small percentage of what the bed has to offer, scientists have already been able to correct an important misconception surrounding the species.

Initially, researchers noticed what they thought to be sexual dimorphism—an anatomical difference between males and females—on the dinosaurs’ skulls. Some individuals had large convex “bosses” of bone on their noses while others had concave bosses.

However, after careful examination of the skulls, Currie and his peers realized that all the animals actually had convex bosses of bone, some of which had been destroyed post-mortem.

“Because the bone was quite frothy inside, some of the specimens, once the surface broke, had a lot of their bone wash out and look concave,” Currie said.

With so much left to uncover, Currie speculates that we still have much to learn from lakustai and Alberta’s rich fossil beds.

“Here in Alberta, we have some of the very best sites in the world for dinosaur diversity,” Currie concluded.

“This is all really critical to understanding what was going on 65 million years ago. It helps paint a picture of why they were so successful and so diverse.”