New "Grinding Mouth, Wrinkle Eye" and Island-Hopping Dinosaurs Found

Two new dinosaurs were reported today: a North American herbivore whose name translates to "grinding mouth, wrinkle eye," and a three-foot-long dwarfed species, Ajkaceratops, which is Europe's first horned dinosaur.

Here's Grinding-Mouth, Wrinkle-Eye (Jeyawati rugoculus)

(Credit: Lukas Panzarin)

Jeyawati was closely related to duck-billed hadrosaurs, which were abundant across the Northern Hemisphere 80 to 65 million years ago. Jeyawati retains some primitive features of the teeth and jaws that preclude it from being a fully-fledged hadrosaur.

As its name suggests, this plant-eating dinosaur could seriously chow down on ferns and conifer trees in its habitat, now western New Mexico.

For more information about this new species, please check out this University of Pennsylvania page.

Ajkaceratops, the new horned dinosaur, was found in what is now Hungary, which was an island back in the Late Cretaceous, when the herbivorous animal called the place home.

At that time, much of Europe was a complex series of island chains lying between the African and Eurasian land masses. 

Technically, horned dinosaurs are referred to as Ceratopsians. They were a highly diverse group of plant eaters that existed in the Late Cretaceous period. They lived in east Asia and western North America and were thought to have been geographically limited to these areas.

But in the latest issue of Nature, Attila Osi and colleagues describe the new species, which indicates that the interchange of animals between Asia and Europe during the Late Cretaceous may have been possible through some kind of ‘island-hopping’ dispersal event.

In an accompanying "News and Views" piece, also in Nature, noted dinosaur expert Xing Xu writes that "Ajkaceratops or its immediate ancestors reached Europe during the early Late Cretaceous by 'island hopping' across the Tethys Ocean, a prehistoric ocean lying between the southern and northern continents."

How the dinosaurs exactly did this hopping is still a mystery. They might have moved across some kind of land bridge, skipped over rocks or maybe even swam? All we know is they somehow wound up on European islands.

You can see a small drawing of an Ajkaceratops head here. And below are some photos from the excavation in Hungary:

(The Iharkút site where Ajkaceratops was unearthed.
Photo by Gábor Czirják)

(Photo by István Fozy)

(Photo by Gábor Czirják)

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