Horned dinosaur find opens window to past A long way back: A triceratops. Palaeontologists have found the fossil of a strange horned dinosaur which roamed an island continent known as Laramidia. Dubbed Nasutuceratops titusi, the creature lived during the late Cretaceous about 76 million years ago. It belonged to the family of herbivore ceratops dinos, of which the famous triple-horned triceratops was a member. Its skull, uncovered nearly intact, comprised an oversized snout, extraordinarily long, blade-like horns that pitched forward over the eyes, and a trademark bony frill at the base of the head. From horn tip to tail tip, it was about four metres long. The discovery, in Utah, provides more tantalising details about a 27 million-year spell in the late Cretaceous when high temperatures melted global icecaps and forced up sea levels, according to the study by researchers at the University of Utah and published in British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society. The ocean spilled into central North America, leaving two big land masses riding above a warm, shallow sea. One, in the east, has been called Appalachia, while an Australia-sized landmass in the west, running from Alaska all the way down to Mexico, has been named Laramidia, according to a 17-year-old theory. The unusual shape of Nasutuceratops titusi shows how giant species differentiated to fit in to a local habitat. There are five giant (rhinoceros to elephant-sized) mammals in Africa. But in the late Cretaceous, there may have been more than two dozen huge species of dinosaurs living on a landmass about one-quarter that size.