If you follow the Western Science Center on social media, you have probably noticed that horned dinosaur fever has gripped the museum. We are gearing up for the March 24 opening of "Great Wonders: The Horned Dinosaurs", a new exhibit dedicated to the ceratopsians. The most famous ceratopsian must be Triceratops. Triceratops lived at the very end of the age of dinosaurs, right up to the mass extinction that wiped out all the dinosaurs (except modern birds) 66 million years ago.While elephant-sized Triceratops thundered across the American West, another, smaller type of ceratopsian scurried around at the same time. This dog-sized ceratopsian was called Leptoceratops. Here is an artist's depiction of this little dinosaur: http://images.dinosaurpictures.org/Leptoceratops-Peter-Trusler_036f.jpg. The object shown here is a possible tooth of Leptoceratops in the collections of the Western Science Center. It is tiny - the black and white squares on the scale bar next to the tooth are each only 1 centimeter long. This tooth was collected in a rock layer called the Hell Creek Formation, in Montana. It is one of many fossil discoveries made by the late Harley Garbani. We are now working to determine whether this tooth is Leptoceratops and, if so, whether it came from the upper or lower jaw.by Andrew McDonald
