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Concept
Bagaceratops
Summary
Bagaceratops (meaning "small-horned face") is a genus of small protoceratopsid dinosaurs that lived in Asia during the Late Cretaceous, around 72 to 71 million years ago. Bagaceratops remains have been reported from the Barun Goyot Formation and Bayan Mandahu Formation. One specimen may argue the possible presence of Bagaceratops in the Djadochta Formation.
Bagaceratops was among the smallest ceratopsians, growing up to in length, with a weight about . Although emerging late in the reign of the dinosaurs, Bagaceratops had a fairly primitive anatomy—when compared to the much derived ceratopsids—and kept the small body size that characterized early ceratopsians. Unlike its close relative, Protoceratops, Bagaceratops lacked premaxillary teeth (cylindrical, blunt teeth near the tip of the upper jaw).
During the large field work of the Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions in the 1970s, abundant protoceratopsid specimens were discovered on eroded surfaces of the Hermiin Tsav locality of the Barun Goyot Formation, Gobi Desert. This newly collected and rich fossil material is stored in the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland). In 1975, two of the expedition's leading scientists, namely Polish paleontologists Teresa Maryańska and Halszka Osmólska, published a large monograph dedicated to describe this material where they named the new genus and type species of protoceratopsid Bagaceratops rozhdestvenskyi. The selected holotype is ZPAL MgD-I/126, which consists of a relatively medium-sized skull, and a vast majority of the specimens collected by the expeditions were assigned to Bagaceratops, including juvenile and sub-adult skulls. The generic name, Bagaceratops, means "small-horned face" and is derived from the Mongolian baga = meaning small; and Greek ceratops = meaning horn face. The specific name, B. rozhdestvenskyi, is named in honor of the Russian paleontologist Anatoly Konstantinovich Rozhdestvensky for his notorious work on dinosaurs.
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