After having discovered the fossilized remains of a horned dinosaur in the basement of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, Nicholas Longrich, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University, has names the ‘new’ dinosaur ‘Mojoceratops’; thereby rejecting the traditions that generally govern the nomenclature of dinosaurs.

Saying that the “funky” name of the “funky” dinosaur – which is nearly the size of a small rhinoceros with a gaudy heart-shaped frill – was devised over a round of drinks with fellow paleontologists, Longrich added that the name ‘Mojoceratops’ struck upon almost out of thin air!

Apparently, the huge plant-eating Mojoceratops dinosaur walked the Earth nearly 75 million years back in the area that is the present-day Canada; and the species probably survived for only around one million years.

Longrich chanced upon the discovery of the Mojoceratops, which seemingly was hiding in plain sight for years, during the course of his study of a dinosaur called a Chasmosaurus from museum fossil specimens.

Talking about the Mojoceratops’ discovery - published in this month’s edition of the Journal of Paleontology – and its unique nomenclature, Longrich said in a recent interview that initially he thought the paleontology community would not accept the name.

However, adding that the objections were basically scientific, Longrich said: “They gave me heck about the way I was splitting up the species, and not the name.”