Two announcements this week show just how much we're still discovering about the wonderful world of dinosaurs: two horned dinosaur species have now joined the Triceratops family.

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Two separate teams of researchers announced that they verified two separate, new species, both with very intriguing shields and horns. They're called Machairoceratops cronusi and Spiclypeus shipporum. For both, it's taken years to confirm that they're dinosaurs the likes of which we've never seen before; but now scientists are certain.

The Machairoceratops cronusi fossil was discovered in southern Utah by an international team of scientists 10 years ago. Now, their findings have finally been published in the journal PLOS One. 

“The first parts of the specimen were discovered on the surface in 2006, but the full excavation was completed over two additional field seasons," study co-author Patrick O’Connor of the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine at Ohio University told HuffPost. "Then, the process of doing the careful laboratory preparation took another couple of years.” 

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In the years since the initial discovery, paleontologists have been able to determine that the huge creature was 26 feet long, weighed in at 2 tons, and, like its Triceratops cousin, was a plant eater. It lived with other animals like it 77 million years ago. But there was still plenty that makes this species special in comparison to the better-known horned dinosaurs.

“Machairoceratops is unique in possessing two large, forward curving spikes off of the back of the neck shield, each of which is marked by a peculiar groove extending from the base of the spike to the tip, the function of which is currently unknown,” Eric Lund, a graduate student at Ohio University and the study's lead author, said in a press release.

The other dinosaur, Spiclypeus shipporum  – better known by its nickname Judith  – was discovered not by an team of specialists but rather an amateur fossil collector. 

“I found it accidentally on purpose,” Bill Shipp, the retired nuclear physicist who made the discovery back in 2005, told the Associated Press. “I was actually looking for dinosaur bones, but with no expectation of actually finding any.”

This horned dinosaur also lived more than 70 million years ago, but its fossils were found quite a ways away from the other new species announced this week, at the Judith River Rock Formation near Winifred, Montana. 

This dinosaur was 15 feet long but weighed twice as much as Machairoceratops. What it made up for in heft it lacked in mobility; according to paleontologists' findings published in PLOS One, this specimen showed signs of osteoarthritis. 

“An effort like this underscores both the necessity and excitement of basic, exploratory science in order to better understand the history of the world around us,” O'Connor said in a statement. “Even in a place like western North America, where intense work has been conducted over the past 150 years, we are still finding species new to science."

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