A new species of giant horned dinosaur has been discovered that researchers say is the “largest and most ornate” of its kind ever found, according to a study published Thursday in the journal PeerJ.
Fossils of the dinosaur, which has been named Lokiceratops rangiformis – including a skull and a partial skeleton – were discovered on private land at Kennedy Coulee, in the badlands of northern Montana near the US-Canada border.
Lokiceratops belongs to a group of horned dinosaurs known as ceratopsids, which evolved during the Late Cretaceous period, about 92 million years ago, and survived until the end of the dinosaurs.
Researchers said Lokiceratops was a plant-eating dinosaur that lived in the swamps and floodplains of present-day Montana about 78 million years ago and is a cousin of the infamous Triceratops.
Lokiceratops is estimated to have been 22 feet long and weighed about 11,000 pounds. This makes it the largest herbivore in its ecosystem at the time it was alive.
Fossil skull bones of Lokiceratops reconstructed and on display at the Museum of Evolution in Maribo, Denmark.
Museum of Evolution
According to researchers, the horns are the largest and most ornate ever found in the dinosaur family it belongs to. The dinosaur does not have a nose horn, but two large, asymmetrical horns on each side of the middle of the back of the grill, as well as a spike in the middle of the grill and more than 20 horns along the grill.
The distinctive horns inspired the name Lokiceratops. The first half pays homage to the Norse God Loki and means “the horned face of Loki” while rangiformis means “looks like a caribou” in reference to how dinosaur horns resemble those of a caribou.
“This is one of the most exciting dinosaurs I’ve had the privilege of working with,” told ABC News Dr. Joseph Sertich, a paleontologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and co-author. “So he has one of the most beautiful sets of horns, and spikes along the edge of his rib, including most of the horns ever seen along the edge of a horn, and is also the largest member of the set of of horned dinosaurs — one of the largest ever found in North America.”
The fossils were discovered in 2019 and were cleaned, restored and mounted in Pleasant Grove, Utah. Dr. Mark Loewen, a paleontologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History and co-lead author, told ABC News. He said the team had individual skull bones in pieces rather than having an entire skull intact.
“We put them all on a table and started putting them back together,” he said. “You came out, they fit together with a click, so they just broke in the field before they were buried. What’s interesting is, as we put the skull together, it became very clear that this was a new dinosaur. We were seeing a dinosaur that nobody in the world knew about for 78 million years.”
He said researchers compared the bones to those of dinosaurs in museums around the world to confirm it was a new species.
Lokiceratops is the fifth dinosaur identified from the ceratopsid family from this region of North America, indicating that some of them lived alongside each other. The researchers said it also indicates a higher level of dinosaur diversity than previously understood.
Reconstruction of Lokiceratops surprised by a crocodile in the 78-million-year-old swamps of northern Montana, USA.
©Andrey Atuchin for the Museum of Evolution in Maribo, Denmark.
“When I started as a paleontologist, we expected to find only two ceratopsians at any given time in any one place in western North America,” Loewen said. “What’s interesting is finding this animal next to four different closely related species, and a fifth distantly related species, is like going to Africa, to the Serengeti, and finding five different species of elephant. This it’s completely unheard of.”
Loewen said he, his students and colleagues hope to find more specimens in more areas to understand the relationships of Lokiceratops and its closely related species and how they lived.
The skull bones will be permanently displayed at the Museum of Evolution in Maribo, Denmark, while a reconstruction of the skull — with a full-size sculpture — will be displayed at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City for the foreseeable future. six months.