THE WEE IRON LIZARD

The first unique dinosaur species native to BC has debuted. Ferrisaurus sustutensis (the iron lizard of the Sustut River, named such for the specimen being found along a railway line near the river), is a member of a rare family of little, hornless or small-horned, beaked dinos known as Leptoceratopsidae.

You can think of them as Triceratops but only two metres long, standing less than a metre tall, and weighing only 150kgs (they're just wee, hence the "lepto" in the name), and without the massive plate, called a frill, on its head or any of the pokey bits. They look like what you might imagine a baby of any ceratopsian species to look like and about that size, too. They were not elephant-sized like a Triceratops but closer to that of a large hog. They roamed the mountainous redwood-esque forests of northern BC around 67 million years ago.

Dr Arbour (who's first name is Victoria and is the Royal BC Museum's paleontology curator and, so, works at the Victoria Harbour), scoured the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, and the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis to compare the fossils in her collection with their more complete ferrisaurus skeletons.

Extrapolating from there, she and her co-author from the Royal Ontario Museum, Dr Evans, were able to sort out a best approximation of this new species, Ferrisaurus sustutensis. Nice work, team!

THE RESEARCH

Arbour & Evans, 2019 - A new leptoceratopsid dinosaur from Maastrichtian-aged deposits of the Sustut Basin, northern British Columbia, Canada - https://peerj.com/articles/7926