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Bourke drew from a branch of engineering called computational fluid dynamics, an approach commonly used in the aerospace industry and medicine, to model how air flowed through the noses of modern-day dinosaur relatives such as ostriches and alligators. "Once we got a handle on how animals today breathe," Bourke said, "the tricky part was finding a good candidate among dinosaurs to test our methods."

When Bourke digitally inserted respiratory turbinates of different shapes—whether it was the scrolled turbinate of a turkey or the branched turbinate of an ostrich—the computer airflow simulations started to make more sense.

"Some of the restored airflow patterns now carried odors to the olfactory region," said Bourke. "We don't really know what the exact shape of the respiratory turbinate was in Stegoceras, but we know some kind of baffle had to be there. We have the smoking gun of the bony ridge on the fossil, and the airflow analyses show that attaching some kind of turbinate produced the only airflow that made any real biological sense."

Why have turbinates at all? Some scientists had previously suggested that warm-blooded animals such as birds and mammals have turbinates to act like condensers to save water that might have been lost during exhalation. That may be true in some cases, but this new research suggests that turbinates also have important functions as baffles to direct air to the olfactory region. But they might also play another critical role—cooling the brain.