The nearly complete skull
USNM 2412, the holotype specimen of
Nedoceratops hatcheri, was found in eastern Wyoming in 1891, in
Niobrara County near
Lightning Creek. The paper that described
Nedoceratops was originally part of
O. C. Marsh's
magnum opus, his
Ceratopsidae monograph. Marsh died in 1899 before the work was completed, and
John Bell Hatcher endeavored to complete the
Triceratops section. However, he died of
typhus in 1904 at the age of 42, leaving the paper still incomplete. It fell to
Richard Swann Lull to complete the monograph in 1905, publishing Hatcher's description of a skull separately and giving it the name
Diceratops hatcheri;
Diceratops means "two horned face." Since the
Diceratops paper had been written by Hatcher, and Lull had only contributed the name and published the paper after Hatcher's death, Lull was not quite as convinced of the distinctiveness of
Diceratops, thinking it primarily
pathological. By 1933, Lull had second thoughts about
Diceratops being a distinct genus and he put it in a subgenus of
Triceratops:
Triceratops (
Diceratops)
hatcheri, including
T. obtusus; largely attributing its differences to being that of an aged individual. Unaware that Ukrainsky had already renamed the animal,
Octávio Mateus coined another new name for it in 2008,
Diceratus.
Diceratus is thus a
junior synonym of
Nedoceratops.
Nedoceratops means "insufficient horned face". The "nedo" is the
Russian prefix meaning "insufficient". The suffix "ceratops", common among
ceratopsians, means "horned face". It was named in reference to its lack of a nasal horn. ==Description==