Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei
Pronunciation
Serr-enn-dipp-ah-sair-ah-tops ar-ther-see-klark-eye
Meaning
Arthur C. Clarke’s (famous sci-fi writer [2001: A Space Odyssey] and friend of Pat and Tom Rich) serendipitous (because of the fortuitous way in which it was identified; Sarandib is also the former Muslim trader name of Clarke’s adopted country of Sri Lanka) horned face (keratos is Greek for horn, ops is Greek for face)
Period
Early Cretaceous (125–120 Mya)
Discovery and publication
Discovered at “The Arch” near Kilcunda, Victoria in 1993 by a team including Tom Rich, Patricia Vickers-Rich and Mike Cleeland. It was described as a ceratopsian by Tom Rich & Patricia Vickers-Rich in 1994, and named by them in 2003.
Description
The only known bone of Serendipaceratops is an ulna (forearm bone). For many months after its discovery, its identity was a puzzle. However, when Tom Rich & Patricia Vickers-Rich visited the Royal Tyrell Museum in Canada in 1993, Darren Tanke was in the process of laying out a skeleton of Centrosaurus (a horned dinosaur similar to Triceratops) near their workspace. They soon realised that the ulna of the Centrosaurus was very similar to their mystery ulna. Pat and Tom then looked at the ulna of a much smaller ceratopsian from Canada, named Leptoceratops, and realised that the two bones were almost identical.
However the identification of Serendipaceratops as a ceratopsian is problematic, not least because it is based on only a single bone. Although it is widely agreed that Serendipaceratops is an ornithischian (bird-hipped dinosaur), some palaeontologists think that trying to determine the precise position of Serendipaceratops on the ornithischian family tree is impossible beyond a certain point, and consequently consider it a “nomen dubium” (doubtful name).
Nevertheless, Tom Rich and colleagues continue to support the interpretation of this dinosaur as a ceratopsian, backed up by a recent statistical analysis of the bone which shows that the bone has the right proportions for a ceratopsian.