page_title: Montanoceratops
section_title: Classification
hierarchical_section_title: Montanoceratops / Classification
caption_attribution_description: Juvenile Montanoceratops skeleton on display at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. This specimen was collected in Glacier County, Montana. Montanoceratops (its name means "Montana horned face") was a small frilled dinosaur that lived about 72 to 70 million years ago in Montana and Alberta. The first fossil remains of Montanoceratops were collected near Buffalo Lake, Montana, in 1916. It was about 10 feet long, and roughly 3.5 feet high at the hip. It had a very vertical tail, which was probably a sexual signalling device.
context_page_description: Montanoceratops is an extinct genus of small ceratopsian dinosaur that lived approximately 70 million years ago during the latter part of the Cretaceous Period in what is now Montana and Alberta. Montanoceratops was a small sized, moderately-built, ground-dwelling, quadrupedal herbivore, that could grow up to an estimated 3 m long.
context_section_description: In 1942, Brown assigned the type material AMNH 5464 to the genus Leptoceratops which he concluded was a member of the taxon "protoceratopsidae". In 1951, Charles Mortram Sternberg examined more material belonging to Leptoceratops which showed that AMNH 5464 was a distinct genus, and hence he reassigned it to a new genus Montanoceratops. In 1996, Chinnery and Weishampel conducted a phylogenetic analysis of basal neoceratopsians which showed that the "protoceratopsidae" was a polyphyletic group (i.e. not a valid taxon) and designated Montanoceratops as the most advanced basal neoceratopsian. In 2001, Mackovicky, concluded that Montanoceratops belonged to the taxon Leptoceratopsidae, and defined this group as consisting of Leptoceratops gracilis and all species closer to Leptoceratops than to Triceratops horridus. A study by Ryan et al. (2012) confirmed this assignment.
  The following cladogram is based on a 2015 analysis by Yiming He, Peter J. Makovicky, Kebai Wang, Shuqing Chen, Corwin Sullivan, Fenglu Han, Xing XuMichael J. Ryan, David C. Evans, Philip J. Currie, Caleb M. Brown and Don Brinkman.
caption: Juvenile specimen from Montana
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