You are in the forested plains of North America, 81 million years ago.

The air was heavy and warm, filled with the scent of crushed ferns and damp earth as you stepped into the clearing. It was a wide-open expanse, a savanna-like grassland dotted with low shrubs, bathed in the golden light of the late Cretaceous morning.

You stopped abruptly, your breath hitching in your throat.

Just twenty yards away, a small herd of Diabloceratops were foraging. There were perhaps six or seven of them—stocky, medium-sized herbivores, easily 15 feet in length from their powerful beaks to their short, sturdy tails. They weren't grazing on grass, but rather ruthlessly uprooting ferns and tough cycads, their parrot-like beaks making sharp, shearing sounds as they chewed.

The sunlight glinted off their most striking feature: the towering, narrow frills, each topped with a pair of long, backward-curving spikes that gave them the deserved "devil-horned face" nickname.

One adult stopped chewing and looked directly at me. Its eyes, small and dark, were set beneath two forward-curving brow horns. It didn't bolt. Instead, it let out a low, vibrating hiss—a sound that resonated in your chest—and stamped a heavily scaled, squat foot into the dirt. The others in the herd halted their feeding, turning in unison to form a defensive wall, showcasing the tight social structure typical of these animals.