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“I just knew that this was dinosaur bone but nobody knows what the significance of it is,” Hews said.

The large horn that Hews found poking out was actually one of the key features of the dinosaur’s “magnificent” skull, said Brown. Researchers also uncovered two very short stubby horns above the eyes of the skull, as well as its frill on the back. The skull is 1.5 metres long and researchers predict that the entire body, the rest of which hasn’t been found, would have been five metres long and weighing 1.5 tonnes.

Photo by Crystal Schick / Calgary Herald

“Amazingly this thing is still in three dimensions,” said researcher Donald Henderson, the museum’s curator of dinosaurs. “Most of our dinosaurs are squashed flat. They’ve all had some sort of compaction but this one was sitting upright. It’s so amazingly preserved.”

After a careful extraction, which involved separating the specimen from very hard rock with the use of a helicopter, it was taken back to the museum, where workers separated rock from the surface of the bone, and reconstructed the skeleton. The excavators nicknamed the dinosaur “Hellboy” to reflect the difficult process.

“The nickname is Hellboy and that’s because it was a hellish quarry and that as we were excavating it, we saw these small horns over the eyes and that just made total sense because the look is very similar to the comic character,” Brown said.

The discovery “changed our understand and evolutionary history of a very important group of dinosaurs,” said Craig Scott, curator of fossil mammals at the museum.

Photo by Crystal Schick / Calgary Herald

Its features are similar to Triceratops, a species of horned dinosaurs part of a group called chasmosaurines, which have a small horn over the nose, large horns over the eyes and a large, yet simple frill. However, Hellboy’s features more closely resemble another group of horned dinosaurs called centrosaurines, which have a large horn over the eyes, small horns over the nose and a short frill.

But Hellboy comes from a period two million years after centrosaurines existed.

“This particular animal is a surprise,” said Brown. “This is strong evidence for convergent evolution between the two main groups. That’s the first time that we’ve really found this for the horned dinosaurs. I don’t think any palaeontologist would have predicted that this specimen would have existed with these types of features at this particular time.”

The horns could have been related to an aspect of display or communication, similar to antlers seen in mammals today, said Brown.

Hews, who has worked as a geologist for the past 35 years, called it a “neat” day after waiting a decade for his discovery to come to fruition.

“This just shows that Alberta has so much diversity of dinosaurs. There is obviously way more to find and new species to be found,” he said. “I’m at the end of my career, this is a great way to end it.”

shudes@calgaryherald.com