Leptoceratopsidae
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| ?Protoceratopsid Conservation status: Fossil |
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Leptoceratops |
The family Leptoceratopsidae, its name derived from the type genus Leptoceratops, is a group of several small neoceratopsian genera which appear not to belong to the clade Protoceratopsidae. They resembled, and were closely related to, other ceratopsids, but all discovered species are generally smaller and more primitive. Leptoceratopsids have so far been found exclusively in the Late Cretaceous of Asia and Western North America, with the exception of a single controversial bone from Australia.
The Leptoceratopsidae are predominantly North American in occurrence, with most described genera found there: Leptoceratops, Montanoceratops and Prenoceratops. There is evidence of a much wider geographical occurrence, with Udanoceratops in Mongolia, and a leptoceratopsid ulna, named Serendipaceratops, from Victoria in Australia.
Leptoceratopsids range in age from Udanoceratops, of the late Santonian or early Campanian, to Leptoceratops, right at the end of the Cretaceous in the late Maastrichtian.
The family, implicitly named by the naming of subfamily Leptoceratopsinae by Nopsca in 1923, was explicitly named by Mackovicky in 2001, when defining a clade Protoceratopsidae as the group consisting of Leptoceratops gracilis and all species closer to Leptoceratops than to Triceratops horridus.
