Phys.org has a piece about a well-preserved Styracosaurus skull which is enlightening paleontologist to the morphological variability of the species.  The skull was not symmetrical and has implications as to how we should identify new (and currently known) species of dinosaurs, especially ceratopsians.  Details are in a paper published in the journal Cretaceous Research.

The skull was discovered by Scott Persons in 2015, then a graduate student in the Department of Biological Sciences, during an expedition in the badlands northwest of Dinosaur Provincial Park.

Nicknamed Hannah, the dinosaur was a Styracosaurus—a horned dinosaur over five metres in length with a fan of long horns. UAlberta paleontologists led by Robert Holmes, professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, have learned much from those horns—because they aren’t symmetrical.

“When parts of one side of the skull were missing, paleontologists have assumed that the missing side was symmetrical to the one that was preserved,” explained Persons. “Turns out, it isn’t necessarily. Today, deer often have left and right antlers that are different in terms of their branching patterns. Hannah shows dramatically that dinosaurs could be the same way.”

The differences in the skull’s left and right halves are so extreme that had the paleontologists found only isolated halves, they might have concluded that they belong to two different species