You are in the floodplains of North America, 76 million years ago.

The air in the Late Cretaceous swamp of Laramidia (present-day Utah) was thick, humid, and smelled intensely of wet ferns and sulfur. You were crouched behind the thick buttress roots of a massive conifer, your heart hammering against your ribs.

Through the mist, it appeared. It wasn't the largest dinosaur in this swamp, but it was certainly the most absurd. A Kosmoceratops—roughly fifteen feet of ornately decorated, herbivorous muscle—stepped into the clearing.

You counted the horns. One on the nose, one over each eye, one on each cheek, and a bizarre "bangs" arrangement of ten more across the top of its broad, bony frill. It was a bizarre, beautiful masterpiece of evolution, far more "horny" than its cousin Triceratops.

The horned dinosaur stopped only twenty feet from your hiding spot, seemingly unbothered by your presence. It let out a low, vibrating hum, like a distant chainsaw, and used its massive beak to shear through a thick palm frond, displaying a surprisingly delicate touch for an animal adorned with 15 horns. You caught the sunlight glinting off its strangely shaped, hooked projections on its frill.

It turned its massive head, and for a second, you looked directly into its eyes…