In a prehistoric precursor to today's close ties between the United States and Canada, an armored, club-tailed dinosaur recently found in New Mexico was apparently related to dinosaurs in Alberta, new research says.

According to paleontologists from the University of Alberta, between 76 to 66 million years ago, Alberta was home to at least five species of ankylosaurid dinosaurs, the group that includes club-tailed giants like Ankylosaurus.

So, while many fewer of the armored creatures are known from the southern regions of North America, when UA researchers were asked to join a study project in New Mexico -- and were introduced to the Ziapelta sanjuanensis, a new species discovered in the southwestern state's Bisti/De-na-zin Wilderness area about three years ago -- they approached the fossils like a long-lost family member, found 1,303 miles to the south.

"We were really excited by both its familiarity and its distinctiveness-we were pretty sure right away we were dealing with a new species that was closely related to the ankylosaurs we find in Alberta," Victoria Arbour, a recent UA doctoral graduate, said in a news release.

The dinosaur had been unearthed by researchers from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and the State Museum of Pennsylvania.

Arbour and current doctoral student Mike Burns, both UA Faculty of Science researchers, had been asked to join their American colleagues because of their expertise in the diversity of ankylosaurs from the Great White North.

Described in a new paper published by the journal PLOS ONE, the Ziapelta sanjuanensis is unique from other ankylosaurs because of the unusually tall spikes it sports on the cervical half ring, a bone structure that sits like a yoke over the neck.

It ended up the Ziapelta, whose skull as well was shaped differently from other known ankylosaurs, was strongly related to species found in Alberta's Dinosaur Provincial Park.

"The horns on the back of the skull are thick and curve downwards, and the snout has a mixture of flat and bumpy scales -- an unusual feature for an ankylosaurid," said Arbour. "There's also a distinctive large triangular scale on the snout, where many other ankylosaurids have a hexagonal scale."

It's believed the Ziapelta lived during the late Cretaceous, when Alberta and New Mexico were separated by a large inland sea that divided North America.

An abundance of ankylosaur fossils have been unearthed in several of Alberta's rocky formations, but none have yet been found in the lower part of an area called the Horseshoe Canyon Formation.

"The rocks in New Mexico fill in this gap in time, and that's where Ziapelta occurs," says Arbour. "Could Ziapelta have lived in Alberta, in the gap where we haven't found any ankylosaur fossils yet? It's possible, but in recent years there has also been increasing evidence that the dinosaurs from the southern part of North America -- New Mexico, Texas and Utah, for example -- are distinct from their northern neighbors."

Arbour noted Ziapelta may have belonged to the group of southern dinosaurs, although more fossils could be waiting for discovery on the northers side of the border.

"We should be on the lookout," she said.