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Beg

Say it: BEG

Name means: “named after Beg-tse, a Mongolian god of war”1

Ate: PlantsHorned dinosEarly Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous

Beg was a small, plant-eating dinosaur that lived in what is now Mongolia. It had a beak and cheek teeth for chewing tough plants, and its skull had bumpy, armor-like bones. Beg is one of the earliest horned dinosaurs ever found in Mongolia.1 2

Lived

106 to 94 million years ago2

Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Algui Ulan Tsav, Ömnögovi Province, Mongolia1 2

Food

Plants2

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

cool stuff

Fun facts

Beg is the oldest known neoceratopsian dinosaur from Mongolia. Before its discovery, neoceratopsians were only known from younger, Late Cretaceous rocks in that region.1

The only fossil of Beg is a partial skull and a few other bones, including a rib and part of a shoulder blade. It was found by a joint Mongolian-American expedition in 2015.1

Beg had a unique skull with five equally spaced bumps on the side of its lower jaw. These bumps may have been covered by a horny sheath.1

Beg lived around 100 million years ago, right at the boundary between the Early and Late Cretaceous. Its age is estimated between 113 and 94 million years old.1

The name Beg comes from a Mongolian war god, Beg-tse, who is often shown with armor and bumpy skin, similar to the rough bones on Beg's skull.1

Beg had four large, cylindrical teeth in its upper jaw (premaxilla), which is a primitive feature not seen in later horned dinosaurs.1

AI-made picture of Beg — An AI-made picture of how Beg might have looked, made by a computer from what scientists know. It is a guess: the real animal may have looked different, and nobody knows its true colours.

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For dino experts

Scientific name: Beg
Named by: Yu et al. 20202
Group: Horned dinos
Family / clade: Neoceratopsia2
Classification: Ornithischia > Ceratopsia2
Age of the rocks: 106 to 94 million years (Albian / Cenomanian)2
Rock formations: Ulaanoosh2
Countries: Mongolia2
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database2
Discovery: Beg was named in 2020 by Yu and colleagues based on a partial skeleton found in 2015 during a joint Mongolian Academy of Sciences and American Museum of Natural History expedition near Tsogt-Ovoo, Mongolia.1 2
Still debated: Scientists are not sure exactly how big Beg was because only a partial skull and a few other bones have been found. They also debate its exact age because the rocks where it was found are difficult to date.1

Where the facts come from

A neoceratopsian dinosaur from the early Cretaceous of Mongolia and the early evolution of ceratopsia (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
Beg in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

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