Short History Lessons

Many partial remains do not generally introduce a large amount of independent study in the annals of publication. The reason, of course, is that partial remains do not contain a lot of material to be described or to guide inferences into form or function. The material that is known for Hualianceratops, for example, is a minimalistic (not in a derogatory way) collection of cranial elements from a single individual that have not been studied much beyond the scope of the initial description and phylogenetic comparisons (newly published) made in other papers by some of the original authors. The original description, remember, was the work of a collaboration between paleontologists associated with the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) and George Washington University published through The Public Library of Science as Han, et al. 2015. As stated earlier, there are few studies of this animal outside of these two studies. One study that has specifically mentioned and discussed Hualianceratops in a different context, though, is Maiorino, et al. 2017. This paper discusses biomechanical function of ceratopsian dinosaurs during feeding. What that means, in layman's terms, is that the paper describes how ceratopsian dinosaurs eat their food. The paper also addresses differences in the form of the ceratopsian skull across species.