Discoveries and Species
American paleontologist Barnum Brown named Anchiceratops in 1914, as he believed Anchiceratops was a transitional form closely related to both Monoclonius and Triceratops and intermediate between them. There is one valid species known today (A. ornatus), whose name refers to the ornate margin of its frill. A second species was named A. longirostris by Charles M. Sternberg in 1929, but this species is widely considered a junior synonym of A. ornatus today.
The first remains of Anchiceratops were discovered along the Red Deer River in the Canadian province of Alberta in 1912 by an expedition led by Barnum Brown. The holotype is the back half of a skull, including the long frill, and several other partial skulls were found at the same time, which are now stored in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. A complete skull was discovered by C.M. Sternberg in 1924, and described as A. longirostris five years later. Another specimen, collected by Sternberg in 1925, lacks the skull but is otherwise the most complete skeleton known from any ceratopsid, preserving a complete spinal column down to the last tail vertebra. Sternberg's material is now housed in the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. Other material has been found since, including one or two bonebed deposits in Alberta, but very little Anchiceratops material has been described (Dodson, 1996).
Most Anchiceratops fossils have been discovered in the Horseshoe Canyon Formation of Alberta, which belongs to the later part of the Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous Period (Anchiceratops remains are known from the lower part of the formation, and range in age between 72.5-71 million years ago). Frill fragments found in the early Maastrichtian Almond Formation of Wyoming in the United States resemble Anchiceratops (Farke, 2004). However, pieces of a frill have been found from two localities in the older Oldman and Dinosaur Park Formations (late Campanian, 76.5-75 million years ago) with the characteristic pattern of points seen in Anchiceratops frills. These may represent early records of A. ornatus or possibly a second, related species (Langston, 1959).
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