Remember Mojo Nixon? How about Muddy Waters singing, "I got my mojo working?"
Now there's Mojoceratops, a new dinosaur that sported a flamboyant heart-shaped head frill, according to a paper recently published in the Journal of Paleontology.
(The skull of Mojoceratops; Credit for all images: Nicholas Longrich/Yale University)
The name "was just a joke," says Nicholas Longrich, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University who coined the dinosaur's name and led the project. "But then everyone stopped and looked at each other and said, 'Wait — that actually sounds cool.' I tried to come up with serious names after that, but Mojoceratops just sort of stuck."
Longrich and his team describe the new ceratopsid dinosaur as being a plant eater about the size of a hippopotamus. Mojoceratops lived 75 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous in what are now Canada's Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces. This was 10 million years before the dinosaur's well-known cousin, Triceratops, first emerged.
"I discovered that 'mojo' is an early 20th-century African-American term meaning a magic charm or talisman, often used to attract members of the opposite sex," Longrich said. "This dinosaur probably used its frill to attract mates, so the name made sense."
The full name is Mojoceratops perifania, with "perifania" meaning pride in Greek.
All ceratopsids have frills on the tops of their skulls, but "Mojoceratops is the most ostentatious," Longrich said.
(Check out how the skull of this new dinosaur rates against those of other related species.)
Longrich first discovered the new dinosaur while looking through fossil collections at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. One skull was mislabeled.
"I realized the skull on the supposed Chasmosaurus must have been a reconstruction," he explained. Struck by its unique shape, Longrich sought other similar skulls elsewhere, but couldn't find any, even after taking trips to museums in Canada.
"The fossils didn't look like anything we'd seen before. They just looked wrong," he said.
Further investigation resulted in eight partial skulls for what turned out to be the new species, Mojoceratops.
"You're supposed to use Latin and Greek names, but this just seemed more fun," Longrich said. "You can do good science and still have some fun, too. So why not?"
Tags: Dinosaurs, Extinct Animals, Late Cretaceous Dinosaurs, Paleontology, Prehistoric Animals
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