One of the world`s biggest dinosaur graves, in China, has yielded a key discovery: the 2-metre-long skull of a ceratopsid, a close relative of the triceratops. It is the first evidence that ceratopsids lived beyond North America.

Since March 2008, over 7600 fossils have been found at the site in Zhucheng city, says Zhao Zijin at Beijing`s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. The bones are thought to date from the Late Cretaceous.

Ceratopsids were four-legged rhino-like herbivores whose huge skulls bore horns and distinctive bony frills. Their remains had been found only in Alaska, western Canada, and the western US. Dinosaur hunters had been bamboozled that ceratopsids had apparently not ventured into Asia as tyrannosaurs did.

"Eastern Asia and western North America had more similar biogeography than we thought," says Tom Holtz of the University of Maryland in College Park.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126902.600-chinas-dinosaur-graveyard-yields-triceratops-cousin.html