STL Science Center

STL Science Center

31 August 2011

By Now....

We have researched almost every high profile paleontologist from the era of the Bone Wars. Thankfully, Styracosaurus' story of discovery barely involves those big names. Instead, it involves a man named C.M. Sternberg, who was a big name in his own right, and has been mentioned a few times, but not really gone over in detail. Charles Sternberg discovered many dinosaurs in Alberta, Canada in an area known now as the Dinosaur Park Formation in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Canada. Sternberg worked with Lawrence Lambe who named Styracosaurs, but how did he stumble upon this crazy looking animal?

In 1913 Sternberg was working in the quarries of Dinosaur Provincial Park when he found the first fossil remains of Styracosaurus. Not a lot is detailed about what he first found, but in 1915, the AMNH found a nearly completely articulated skull and a partial skeleton. Given this knowledge it's safe to assume that Sternberg found a good amount of the entire Styracosaurus skeleton. A number of other sites existed for finding the other two species which have, in the past, been included in the Styracosaurus genus (S. parksi, now recognized as another specimen of S. albertensisand S. ovatus) and these were found much in the same way as the original species with one coming from Alberta again, and the other from Montana ("S. parksi" and S. ovatus respectively).

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