Phys.org has a story about a pachycephalosaur with interesting headgear.  A newly described species of pachycephalosaur called Platytholus clemensi, who lived around 68 million years ago, seems to sport a bristly head ornament made of keratin.  The animal was described in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The new species is based on a partial pachycephalosaur skull, including its bowling-ball shaped dome, that was unearthed in 2011 in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, which are layers of Upper Cretaceous rock from which paleontologists have collected dinosaur fossils for decades.

Based on CT scans and microscopic analyses of slices through the fossilized dome, paleontologists Mark Goodwin of the University of California, Berkeley, and John “Jack” Horner of Chapman University in Orange, California, concluded that the skull likely had sported bristles of keratin, reminiscent of a brush cut.

“We don’t know the exact shape of what was covering the dome, but it had this vertical component that we interpret as covered with keratin,” Goodwin said, noting that a bristly, flat-topped covering “biologically makes sense. Animals change or use certain features, particularly on the skull, for multiple functions—it could be for display or for social and biological interactions involving visual communication.”

“I would guess that there was something pretty elaborate up there,” said Horner, a lecturer and presidential fellow at Chapman, professor emeritus at Montana State University in Bozeman and emeritus curator at the Museum of the Rockies.