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

The skeleton was found in 2004 and belongs to a group of dinosaurs known as sauropodmorphs. Sauropodmorphs, small plant-eaters, lived across the globe in the Early Jurassic, approximately 175 million to 200 million years ago. Millions of years later, sauropodomorphs evolved into gigantic sauropods (think Brachiosaurus and Diplodicus), long-necked plant eaters whose fossils are well known from elsewhere in Utah, including Dinosaur National Monument.

The new dinosaur species is named Seitaad ruessi (SAY-eet-AWD ROO-ess-EYE), which is derived from the Navajo word, “Seit’aad,” a sand-desert monster from the Navajo creation legend that swallowed its victims in sand dunes; and Ruess, after the artist, poet, naturalist and explorer Everett Ruess who mysteriously disappeared in the red rock country of southern Utah in 1934 at age 20.

In life, the animal would have stood about 3 to 4 feet tall at the hips and was 10 to 15 feet long. It would have weighed approximately 150 to 200 pounds and could walk on two or four legs. Although it was small, Seitaad was likely the largest herbivore in the area at the time.

This finding also confirms sauropodmorphs were successful during the Early Jurassic and hints at potentially more discoveries in the geographic area. According to the lead author of the study, Joseph Sertich, “This new find suggests that there may be more dinosaurs yet to be discovered in these rocks.”

Image reproduced courtesy of the Canadian Museum of Nature