A new species of horned dinosaur, called the xenoceratops—"alien horned-face"—has been discovered in fossil beds in Alberta, Canada.

The discovery is based on remains from at least three adult-sized individuals, which were identified from fossils originally collected in 1958. The creatures would have been approximately six meters long and would have weighed more than two metric tons each.

The xenoceratops was a herbivore with a parrot-like beak, two long brow horns above its eyes and a large frill protruding from the back of its skull with two additional large spikes. It lived around 80 million years ago, making it one of the oldest ceratopsids, the group of large-bodied horned dinosaurs that includes triceratops.

David Evans from the Royal Ontario Museum and University of Toronto said: "Xenoceratops provides new information on the early evolution of ceratopsids. The early fossil record of ceratopsids remains scant, and this discovery highlights just how much more there is to learn about the origin of this diverse group."

Evans and his colleague Michael Ryan stumbled upon the undescribed material more than a decade ago and recognized the bones as a new type of horned dinosaur. Evans later discovered a 50-year-old plaster field jacket—fossils that have been covered in bandages and plaster to protect them while they are dug out—at the Canadian Museum of Nature. This contained more skull bones from the same fossil area, so Evans prepared them in his lab.

Ryan and Evans have been trying to fill in gaps in our knowledge of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs and their evolution through their Southern Alberta Dinosaur Project. They are focusing on the palaeontology of some of the oldest dinosaur-bearing rocks in Alberta, which is less studied than other Canadian fossil regions.

Research describing the new species is published in the October 2012 issue of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.