The oldest horned dinosaur in North America

New fossils of the oldest horned dinosaurs have been found in North America, dating back more than 108 million years ago, according to UPI.

This new dinosaur species is named Aquilops americanus , more ancient than the Triceratops (triceratops) for 40 million years and more than the oldest horned dinosaur ever known about 20 million years.

Newly discovered dinosaur species Aquilops americanus - (Photo: Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology)

New fossils were discovered by a team of archaeologists from the University of Oklahoma (USA). Unearthed in Montana, fossil bone fragments have helped scientists take a new look at ceratopsian birth in North America. The ceratopsian family is known to include genera with large differences in size.

During the fossil Aquilops americanus has discovered that this is an ancient horned dinosaur with a weight of not more than 1.6kg and a rabbit-sized size, then the Triceratops later developed to weigh more than 11 tons.

The Aquilops skull fossil lies within a man's hand, and as an adult, this dinosaur is no longer than 61cm long, according to scientists in the report published in PLoS ONE magazine.

Aquilops was the first fossil to show what the earliest surviving horned dinosaurs in North America looked, study author Andrew Farke, a manager of the Raymond M. Alf Paleontology Museum, said in a press release.