| Avaceratops Temporal range: Late Cretaceous |
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| Mounted skeleton | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Reptilia |
| Superorder: | Dinosauria |
| Order: | Ornithischia |
| Suborder: | Marginocephalia |
| Infraorder: | Ceratopsia |
| Family: | Ceratopsidae |
| Genus: | Avaceratops Dodson, 1986 |
| Species | |
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Avaceratops is a genus of small ceratopsian dinosaur which lived during the late Campanian during the Late Cretaceous Period in what are now the Northwest United States.
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The first fossils of Avaceratops were found in the Judith River Formation of Montana, in 1981.[1] They were preserved scattered through-out the remains of a prehistoric stream bed.[1] This Avaceratops specimen was likely buried in the sandbar after its body was swept downstream by the current.[1]
The original find was made by Eddie Cole and the fossils were formally named in 1986, by Peter Dodson. It was named after Ava, Eddie's wife.[1] The species epithet honors the Lammers family, who owned the land where the holotype fossil was found.[1]
Avaceratops belonged to the family Ceratopsidae within the Ceratopsia (both names being derived from Ancient Greek for 'horned face'), a group of herbivorous dinosaurs with parrot-like beaks which thrived in what are now North America and Asia, during the Cretaceous Period.
Apart from being a ceratopsian, little is certain about Avaceratops's taxonomic position. It is a smallish Ceratopsian with a solid frill[1] (i.e. lacking fenestrae which are typical of many other genera except Triceratops), thus it may be somehow ancestral to Triceratops or occupy a position between the two subfamilies Centrosaurinae and Ceratopsinae. This latter opinion was the one reached by Penkalski and Dodson in 1999.
Avaceratops, like all ceratopsians, was a herbivore. During the Cretaceous, flowering plants were "geographically limited on the landscape", so it is likely that this dinosaur fed on the predominant plants of the era: ferns, cycads and conifers. It would have used its sharp ceratopsian beak to bite off the leaves or needles.