Horned dinosaur fossil discovered in Utah

SALT LAKE CITY – It sounds like an exaggeration, but apparently you can’t set a backpack down in southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument without finding a dinosaur.

That’s exactly what led a scientist to the discovery of the skull of a horned dinosaur that roamed the area 80 million years ago.

The find by paleontologists Jim Kirkland and Don DeBlieux was announced Friday at a conference of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists in Ontario, Canada.

DeBlieux discovered the fossil in 2002 while he was part of a Utah Geological Survey team conducting an inventory of paleontological resources in the national monument. He was taking a photo of another site when he made the find.

“I stopped and put my backpack down on a sandstone ledge and saw bone,” DeBlieux said in a statement.

The protruding fossil turned out to be most of the skull of a ceratopsid, a smaller and older relative of Triceratops.

The horned dinosaur was a plant-eater and probably 15 feet long and 6 feet tall at the shoulders – roughly the size of today’s rhinoceros.

Because of the fossil’s size and the remote area where it was found, it took the group about three years to get the block of rock containing the skull out of the monument.

After whittling the rock to 1,000 pounds, it was shipped out by helicopter.

The Utah Geological Survey said the fossil is unique for having two nose horns. It also is the first of this group of dinosaurs to have been found south of Montana.