Eobasileus

Eobasileus cornutus ("Crowned Dawn-King") is an extinct species of dinocerate mammal.

Description

Eobasileus was 4 metres (13 ft) long and stood 2.1 metres (6.9 ft) tall at the shoulder; and with a weight up to 4000 kg (8818 lbs) it was the largest Uintathere.[1] It looked very similar to the related Uintatherium. Like Uintatherium, it had three pairs of blunt horns on its skull, possibly covered with skin like the ossicones of a giraffe. The frontal pair may have been composed of keratin, like the horn(s) of a rhinoceros. Eobasileus also had a pair of tusks which were shielded by bony protrusions of the lower jaw.

Discovery

Eobasileus was discovered during the pinnacle of the Bone Wars between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, discovered and named by Cope in 1872, Cope had also named it Lopholophodon, but he named it Eobasileus first, so the latter applies, Cope and Marsh duked it out in the journals of American Naturalist for much of the year of 1873, Cope reconstructed Eobasileus as having elephantine features, such as a trunk and two large ears, but Marsh reconstructed it looking much the same way we portray Eobasileus and Uintatherium today, so although Marsh's name was invalid (he named it Dinoceratus, after Joseph Leidy and Edward Drinker Cope named theirs, Uintatherium and Eobasileus respectively), we use Marsh's reconstruction, not Cope's.