What’s in a nose—er, I mean, a name? For the newly described dinosaur, Nasutoceratops titusi, a great, big, honking lot!

Nasutoceratops means “big-nose horned face” and indeed this Triceratops relative is mostly nose. Having a “Jimmy Durante profile,” claims National Geographic’s Phenomena blog. And ScienceNOW says, “Does it sometimes seem that dinosaurs were competing with each other to see who could look the wackiest?”

Behind that nose is a familiar-looking dinosaur, with a huge skull bearing a single horn over the nose, one horn over each eye, and an elongate, bony frill at the rear, like other ceratopsids.

Unearthed in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, the huge plant-eater inhabited swampy Laramidia, a landmass formed when a shallow sea flooded the central region of North America, isolating the western and eastern portions of the continent for millions of years during the Late Cretaceous Period.

“Nasutoceratops is one of a recent landslide of ceratopsid discoveries, which together have established these giant plant-eaters as the most diverse dinosaur group on Laramidia,” says Andrew Farke of the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology.

And while other ceratopsid fossils in Laramidia have raised questions about whether the specimens represent separate species or instead illustrate the differences between the juveniles and adults of a single species (see our video on that topic), Nasutoceratops titusi is not just a separate species, it’s from an entirely different group (read this article in Nature News to learn more).

So why the distinctive nose? Even scientists can’t sniff this one out. “The jumbo-sized schnoz of Nasutoceratops likely had nothing to do with a heightened sense of smell—since olfactory receptors occur further back in the head, adjacent to the brain—and the function of this bizarre feature remains uncertain,” according to Scott Sampson of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

The findings are published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Image by Lukas Panzarin

But what about creatures that are blind?

If you haven’t already, meet the eastern or common mole, Scalopus aquaticus. In addition to being cute in a kind of creepy way, these mammals are blind and have teeny ears. But they are remarkably good at finding their prey.

Ken Catania, a neurobiologist at Vanderbilt who studies animal sensory systems (he’s one of the researchers responsible for the sensitive alligator study we covered in Science in Action) decided to investigate the mole’s sense of smell.

He didn’t think the moles smelled in stereo—in fact, just the opposite. “I came at this as a skeptic. I thought the moles’ nostrils were too close together to effectively detect odor gradients.” But he’s a scientist—he needed evidence to support his assumption.

To test the theory of stereo smell, he created a radial arena with food wells spaced around the 180-degree circle with the entrance for the mole located at the center. He then ran a number of trials with pieces of earthworm placed randomly in different food wells.

When the mole first entered the arena, it moved its nose back and forth as it sniffed. Then, it seemed to zero in on the food source, moving in a direct path. This was pretty remarkable, and made Catania reconsider the idea of stereo sniffing.

“It was amazing. They found the food in less than five seconds and went directly to the right food well almost every time,” Catania said. “They have a hyper-sensitive sense of smell.”

Catania then blocked one of the moles’ nostrils with a small plastic tube. When their left nostrils were blocked, the moles’ paths consistently veered off to the right, and when their right nostrils were blocked, they consistently veered to the left. They still found the food but it took them significantly longer to do so.

Voilà! Stereo-smelling! (A video of the trials demonstrates this very clearly.)

Catania proved himself wrong and published his findings this week in Nature Communications.

What about the rest of us mammals? Do we smell in stereo?

“The fact that moles use stereo odor cues to locate food suggests other mammals that rely heavily on their sense of smell, like dogs and pigs might also have this ability,” Catania says. But as for humans, he remains skeptical. I guess stereo- vision and hearing is enough…

Image: Ken Catania