Breviceratops

Breviceratops (meaning "short horn face") was a ceratopsian dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia. The fossils come from the Khulsan locality in the Nemegt Basin, Gobi Desert. The specimens were originally described by Maryanska and Osmolska in 1975 and placed in Protoceratops. They were then moved to the a genus, Breviceratops, by Kurzanov in 1990. Kurzanov also referred a number of fossils from Khermin Tsav, the type locality of Bagaceratops to the new genus. The Khermin Tsav specimens closely resemble Bagaceratops, which has led to the proposal that Breviceratops and Bagaceratops are synonymous. However the type specimen from Khulsan has premaxillary teeth and lacks a foramen between the premaxilla and maxilla, features inconsistent with Bagaceratops.

Classification

Breviceratops belonged to the Ceratopsia (the name is Greek for "horned face"), a group of herbivorous dinosaurs with parrot-like beaks which thrived in North America and Asia during the Cretaceous Period. It appears to be most closely related to Protoceratops.

Diet

Breviceratops, like all ceratopsians, was an herbivore.