| Diabloceratops Temporal range: Upper Cretaceous, 75–70 Ma |
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Reptilia |
| Superorder: | Dinosauria |
| Order: | Ornithischia |
| Family: | Ceratopsidae |
| Subfamily: | Centrosaurinae |
| Genus: | Diabloceratops Kirkland et al., 2010 |
| Species | |
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Diabloceratops is a genus of herbivorous dinosaur in the infraorder Ceratopsia. It lived in and around Utah during the Campanian stage.[1]
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The type species, Diabloceratops eatoni, was named and described in 2010 by James Ian Kirkland and Donald DeBlieux. The genus name combines the Spanish diablo, "devil", a reference to the horns on the neck shield, with a Latinised Greek keratops, "horn face", a usual element in ceratopian names. The specific name honours paleontologist Jeffrey Eaton.
The fossil, holotype UMNH VP 16699, was in 2002 found by DeBlieux in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and consists of a partial skull with a piece of the lower jaw.
Diabloceratops was built like a typical ceratopsian in that it had a large neck frill made of bone. It had a small horn on the nose, perhaps a second horn in front of that, and a pair of relatively small horns above the eyes. Upon the frill it also had a pair of very long spikes, like in Einiosaurus and Styracosaurus.
It being one of the earliest centrosaurine ceratopsids, Kirkland noted a character Diabloceratops shared with the more "primitive" protoceratopsid forms. Both possess an accessory opening in the skull that would become much reduced or disappear in later, more advanced ceratopsids. Kirkland saw this as an indication that the earlier species were not together included in some single natural group but instead presented a gradual sequence of ever more derived forms, increasingly closer related to the Ceratopsidae.