This 'magical' dinosaur specimen emerged from the ground like a polished jewel

"It was a cloudy morning in southeast Mongolia. Paleontologist Chinzorig Tsogtbaatar and several colleagues set out by foot from their campsite to a rocky outcrop dating back some 110 million years to the early Cretaceous. "Then, after 15 to 20 minutes, I saw something [on the] other side of the hill," says Tsogtbaatar. It was a bright object of some sort."

""It [didn't] look like a rock," he recalls. "It [was] very unusual." Once he got closer, Tsogtbaatar who now works at North Carolina State University knew exactly what it was. A dome-shaped skull. It turned out that Tsogtbaatar had just discovered a new species of pachycephalosaur, a unique group of dinosaurs defined by their thick, bony, hemispherical skulls but about which little else is known. In that moment, "we just stopped breathing," he says."

""This is the first definitive pachycephalosaur that's ever been found in the early Cretaceous," says Lindsay Zanno, also a paleontologist at North Carolina State University in addition to serving as the head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. "It just pops out of the fossil record with a fully developed dome, and bells and whistles on its head.""

It was discovered in southeast Mongolia at a rocky outcrop dating to about 110 million years ago in the early Cretaceous. The specimen is a dome-shaped skull belonging to a new pachycephalosaur species named Zavacephale rinpoche. The specimen predates the previous oldest pachycephalosaur by about 15 million years. The skull shows a fully developed bony dome and cranial ornamentation characteristic of later pachycephalosaurs. The find fills a critical gap in the early evolution of dome-headed dinosaurs. The discovery provides direct evidence that elaborate cranial domes evolved earlier than previously documented. The specimen and its description were published in Nature.

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