# Styracosaurus albertensis

> A horned dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Alberta, Canada, with a long nose horn and a crown of long spikes on its neck frill. About 5 to 5.5 m long, it browsed low plants on the coastal plains of the Dinosaur Park Formation.

- Classification: Dinosauria (clade) > Ornithischia (clade) > Ceratopsia (clade) > Ceratopsidae (family) > Centrosaurinae (subfamily) > Styracosaurus (genus) > Styracosaurus albertensis (species)
- Length: 5–5.5 m
- Hip height: 1.8 m
- Mass: 1.8–2.7 t
- Age: 75.8–75.1 million years ago (Late Cretaceous)
- Fossils found in: Dinosaur Park Formation (Alberta); Canada
- Diet: herbivore
- Described: Lawrence M. Lambe, 1913

Canonical page: https://dinodex.club/dinosaurs/styracosaurus-albertensis
Last updated: 2026-09-27

## Overview

Styracosaurus albertensis lived about 75 million years ago on the coastal plains of what is now southern Alberta, Canada. Charles H. Sternberg found its first skull on the Red Deer River in 1913, and Lawrence Lambe named it the same year; the rest of the skeleton was dug out of the same quarry in 1935.

It was a centrosaurine ceratopsid, a relative of Centrosaurus and more distantly of Triceratops, with a single long nose horn, small brow horns and four to six long spikes along the back of its frill. A subadult skull described by Brown, Holmes and Currie (2020) shows that the frill spikes grew much longer and thicker as the animal matured, while their position stayed the same.

Its beak and rows of shearing cheek teeth were suited to slicing tough plants. Styracosaurus is relatively rare in the Dinosaur Park Formation, where it lived alongside other horned dinosaurs, duck-billed hadrosaurs and tyrannosaurs such as Gorgosaurus.

## Name meaning

"Spiked lizard", from Greek styrax (the spike at the butt of a spear) and sauros; albertensis for the province of Alberta (Lambe 1913).

## Sources

1. (2026). Paleobiology Database: Styracosaurus albertensis occurrences and type collection 52487. The Paleobiology Database (paleobiodb.org), data service 1.2, accessed 2026-09-23. https://paleobiodb.org/data1.2/occs/list.txt?taxon_name=Styracosaurus%20albertensis&show=coords,paleoloc,strat,loc,ref&pgm=gplates
2. (2026). Wikipedia: Styracosaurus. Wikipedia (English), accessed 2026-09-24. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styracosaurus
3. Brown, C. M., Holmes, R. & Currie, P. J. (2020). A subadult individual of Styracosaurus albertensis (Ornithischia: Ceratopsidae) with comments on ontogeny and intraspecific variation in Styracosaurus. Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology 8: 67-95. https://doi.org/10.18435/vamp29361
4. Eberth, D. A., Evans, D. C., Ramezani, J., Kamo, S. L., Brown, C. M., Currie, P. J. & Braman, D. R. (2023). Calibrating geologic strata, dinosaurs, and other fossils at Dinosaur Provincial Park (Alberta, Canada) using a new CA-ID-TIMS U-Pb geochronology. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1139/cjes-2023-0037
5. Lambe, L. M. (1913). A new genus and species of Ceratopsia from the Belly River Formation of Alberta. The Ottawa Naturalist 27(9): 109-116.
6. Ryan, M. J., Holmes, R. & Russell, A. P. (2007). A revision of the late Campanian centrosaurine ceratopsid genus Styracosaurus from the Western Interior of North America. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 27: 944-962. https://doi.org/10.1671/0272-4634(2007)27[944:AROTLC]2.0.CO;2

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Cite as: "Styracosaurus albertensis". DinoDex. https://dinodex.club/dinosaurs/styracosaurus-albertensis (updated 2026-09-27).