Meet the Dinosaur With the Biggest Nose

It’s easy to get excited about the biggest dinosaur ever found, or the baddest, or some other impressive superlative. But the one with the biggest nose? Somehow, it just doesn’t have the same impact.

Yet that’s what a team of paleontologists are reporting in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. The newly described dino is a hadrosaur, the group that includes the so-called duck-billed dinosaurs. Many of these plant-eating creatures sported huge bony crests atop their heads.

Not this one. “…instead,” reads a press release announcing the discovery, and calling a spade a spade, “this dinosaur has a huge nose.” What else to call it but Rhinorex, or “King Nose.” It was, says the release, the “Jimmy Durante of dinosaurs.” (If you’re under 50 or so, you’ll have to lo0k it up.)

The obvious question is: why would a dinosaur need a gigantic nose? We know why T. Rex sported long, dagger-like teeth and velociraptors needed razor-sharp claws. It’s clear why apatosaurus—better known to many, including Fred Flintstone, as brontosaurus—had such a long neck (like the giraffe’s, it was for more effective browsing).

But paleontologists Terry Gates of North Carolina State University and Rodney Sheetz of Brigham Young, who found the fossil embedded in sandstone in a Brigham Young Museum of Paleontology storage area, haven’t got a clue. It probably wasn’t for smell, but more likely for easy recognition by others of its species, or for knocking down edible plants, or—strange though it might sound—attracting mates.

“We are already sniffing out answers to these questions,” Gates said in a statement. He’s probably already regretting it.