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Famed U.S. fossil hunter Barnum Brown was on his first tromp through Alberta in 1910 when his field team came across a partial skeleton of a horned dinosaur, but passed it by in favour of what he believed to be more impressive discoveries elsewhere in the badlands.

Ninety-one years later, a group of Canadian researchers unknowingly followed in Mr. Brown's footsteps, working in the peculiar Horseshoe Canyon formation located in what is now Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park, about 175 kilometres northeast of Calgary.

"We're sitting there one evening and the camp cook, who had been out looking for bits and pieces, says, 'Oh, I found this,' " David Eberth, senior research scientist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alta., recalled of that field season in 2001.

That's when Glen Guthrie, the cook, pulled out what appeared to be a nasal horn core belonging to a ceratopsian dinosaur and passed it around. The team, despite their collective expertise, was uniformly stumped.

"We marched out in the morning and had a look at the specimen and we just about all fell over," Dr. Eberth said.

They discovered Mr. Brown's long-lost horned dinosaur - something a search of his field notes would only later reveal - but more importantly, they had unearthed a creature previously unknown to science.

The discovery of Eotriceratops xerinsularis (pronounced EE-OH-try-sair-ah-tops ZEER-in-soo-lair-iss), which lived 68 million years ago, was published recently in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, and the specimen is now on display at Royal Tyrrell Museum.

It is the largest type of horned dinosaur ever found in Alberta, and possibly the world, according to researchers at the Royal Tyrrell and the Canadian Museum of Nature who documented the find.

"This thing's a monster," Dr. Eberth said. "It's as big as a Smart car."

Actually, bigger.

From nose to tail, Eotriceratops probably stretched eight or nine metres. Its massive skull, adorned with a solid frill, alone was three metres in length.

The horn core above each eye extended up to 80 centimetres (tack on half as much again to imagine how large the intact horns would have been), and a smaller, 30-centimetre horn core was perched on its nose (again, add another 50 per cent to imagine its full size).

It was a plant eater with teeth sharp enough to slice through rough foliage and roots. By the time it was an adult, it likely didn't need to worry about predators.

What it looked like and where it was found suggests Eotriceratops is an early member of the well-known Triceratops group, which is reflected in its name. It also fills in a gap in the historical understanding of dinosaurs that lived on the continent 67 million to 69 million years ago, according to Tyrrell museum head curator Don Brinkman.

The find is significant as well because it represents the first time a dinosaur skeleton has been identified in the top 20 to 25 metres of the Horseshoe Canyon, which drops down 290 metres, and the first time a ceratopsid has been located in the top quarter of the formation.

The skeleton, which was partially sticking out of the ground, was spread over three square metres in an area rich in coal and organic shale. Since no other remains were found in the area, the researchers figured the skull, vertebrae, ribs and ossified ligaments must belong to a single unique individual. "On all levels the bells started ringing on this thing," Dr. Eberth said.

But shale, which is weak, contributed to some "crushing and distortion" of bones during burial and left behind a pretty flat skeleton.

It may be another reason the Brown expedition from the American Museum of Natural History moved on to discover what is considered the most important Albertosaurus bone bed in the world.

"He was head hunting. These guys were trophy collectors," Dr. Eberth said.

"We're 100 per cent convinced that he saw the specimen and he went, 'It's roadkill. It's not worth collecting.' "