Giant dinosaur skull found in northern Alberta [Video]

It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

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On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground. 

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the …