5.1" Agujaceratops Postorbital Bone - Aguja Formation, Texas

Agujaceratops Postorbital Bone - Aguja Formation, Texas #88740

This is a 5.1" wide, postorbital bone of Agujaceratops from the Late Cretaceous, Aguja Formation of Texas. There have been quite a few stabilized cracks but nothing has been restored. The postorbital is one of the bones in vertebrate skulls which forms a portion of the dermal skull roof and, sometimes, a ring about the eye orbit.

Agujaceratops (meaning "Horned face from Aguja") is a genus of herbivorous ceratopsian dinosaur that would have looked fairly similar to Triceratops. It known as Chasmosaurus it was moved to a new genus Agujaceratops meaning "Horned face from Aguja" in 2006.

This specimen was collected within the past year on private deeded property in Brewster County, Texas. You won't see any other dinosaur material from the Aguja & Javelina Formations for sale because nearly all of the formation lies the borders of Big Bend National Park or in Mexico, where laws prevent collection of fossils for sale. One of our partners was lucky enough to purchase several hundred acres of ranch land in Texas containing a good exposure of these formations.

These formations are equivalent age to the Judith River Formations in the Northern US and Alberta, Canada. Because relatively little collecting has been done on these formations in Texas, most of the species remain undescribed. Our partner has been putting important material into research collections and working with museums and researchers, so in the coming years their work will help lead to formal descriptions for these dinosaurs.

Artist reconstruction of Agujaceratops by Nobu Tamura