Titanoceratops means "giant horn-face". This is because it's a horned dinosaur and, well, really really big. OK, so it's not all that creative a name in terms of etymology but I think it sounds really cool. And Ouranos is the father of the Titans in Greek mythology, referring the fact that this species may have been the progenitor of giant horned dinosaurs such as Triceratops and Torosaurus. Ouranos is of course an alternative spelling of Uranus. The reason it's spelled that way is that Ouranos looks cool on the page and sounds cool when you say it, whereas Uranus is the subject of a lot of juvenile humor. So you can see, there are a lot of really, really technical issues behind naming dinosaurs.
Titanoceratops is one of the ceratopsians- the horned dinosaurs- and as the name implies, a very large one. It's not the biggest, but the skeleton is almost as large as the largest individuals of Triceratops, but substantially younger. It also has a lot of very advanced features seen in Triceratops, such as large sinuses hollowing out the bases of the horns, and a complex system of sinuses in the nose. But Triceratops dates to around 66-68 million years ago, and Titanoceratops dates to around 74 million years ago- about 8 million years earlier, but almost as big and advanced. It's surprising to find something this advanced this far back in time.
To me, it's a bit like doing an archaeological dig at Kitty Hawk looking for bits of the Wright Flier and coming up with bits of a Boeing 777. It seemed remarkably advanced for this time period. Now, it's not that surprising to find that groups evolved earlier than we thought they did. This happens all the time, and it's a pretty common theme for papers. It's a frequent enough occurrence that there's even a name for this (it's called the Signor-Lipps Effect, which is a fancy way of saying that things tend to evolve before the earliest known fossils and go extinct after the last known fossils- you never have the very first or last fossils of a group). But it's one thing to overlook a lineage of little mammals or lizards. It's another thing to overlook a lineage of giant, elephant-sized plant-eaters.
The discovery of Titanoceratops, if you want to call it that, was one of these serendipitous things. As is often the case in paleontology, you go out looking for one thing and find something completely different, and you have to be prepared to make the most of the unexpected. Sometimes this happens in the field, where you go out looking for dinosaurs and find a new turtle. In this case I was just trying to tease apart the relationships of the horned dinosaurs. I was comparing Mojoceratops to more advanced animals such as Triceratops from the Maastrichtian of the Hell Creek in Montana and Wyoming, and Pentaceratops from the Campanian Kirtland of New Mexico. And Pentaceratops was really confusing the heck out of me. Because most of the skulls were relatively small and looked very primitive, more like Mojoceratops, but one of the skulls was gigantic, and looked remarkably similar to Triceratops. I'd never seen this kind of variation within a ceratopsian species before. They looked so different, if you tried to code the anatomy up and generate a tree using a computer program, you'd get the big Pentaceratops coming out next to Triceratops and Torosaurus in the evolutionary tree. And then it hit me that maybe this wasn't a Pentaceratops after all- but a relative of Triceratops.
So I wasn't entirely clear what to think of this animal.
After my PhD, I drove across the country in my old, beat-up white Subaru, getting it older and even more beat up. Along the way I figured I'd stop and check out this skeleton, and I swung through Nebraska (cue Nebraska, by Bruce Springsteen, a desolate and lonely-sounding album that's beautiful at night on the dark highways of Nebraska as the lightning lights up the thunderclouds) and down into Oklahoma, where the skeleton was. I climbed around the specimen and photographed it, and dug in the collection trying to find some more pieces of the skull, and make sense of the animal. After a lot of careful study, I came away convinced that it was exactly what it seemed to be- a giant horned dinosaur related to, perhaps even directly ancestral to, Triceratops. It's pretty rare to actually find ancestors in the fossil record, but there can't have been that many species of giant horned dinosaur around at the time, and this one looks pretty much exactly like you would expect the ancestor of Torosaurus and Triceratops to look, so it is quite like the father of these titans.
A key part of the mystery is the provenance of the specimen. Given how advanced it is, it seemed likely that the animal might not come from the Kirtland at all, but instead come from a younger layer of rock such as the Naashoibito. Unfortunately, nobody took very good notes on where it came from when it was collected in the 1940s. I actually tried to go out and find the hole, and you might think that it would be easy to find a hole that had produced an elephant-sized horned dinosaur, but after a couple of days of wandering around in the badlands with my friend, we were unable to find it. We did wander around some very surreal badlands, finding stumps of ancient trees, huge layers of coal, little stone buildings left by the indians, and most bizarrely of all, the dried out paw of a coyote, although the rest of the coyote was not in sight. I halfway expected it to be clutching an Acme brand dynamite detonator.
Still, the photographs of the quarry and the rock associated with the fossil suggest it's from the lower part of the Kirtland Formation or the upper part of the underlying Fruitland Formation. That would make it Late Campanian in age, about the age of Dinosaur Park in Canada or perhaps a little younger. So it appears that very advanced, Triceratops-like dinosaurs existed quite early in North America. Either the diversification of ceratopsians was much earlier than we thought, or they evolved much more rapidly.
There are also implications for understanding the distribution of dinosaurs. Although the Kaiparowits Formation of New Mexico is quite similar in age to Dinosaur Park, it has different dinosaurs. Titanoceratops down south in New Mexico, Mojoceratops and Chasmosaurus up in Alberta. They do share a genus of horned dinosaur, Pentaceratops- but the species in Alberta seems to be distinct from the one down south. This is something of a puzzle. These dinosaurs clearly can travel long distances. Some dinosaurs, like Tyrannosaurus, even crossed from North America into Mongolia. And yet despite this, entirely different species show up in the North and the South. Of course, we have something similar today- different species of deer in the East and West of North America, for instance. Yet my sense of things is that the faunas are more distinct in the Cretaceous than they are to day. Why that is (assuming this is actually the case) we still don't know.