An artist’s impression of Lokiceratops as it would have appeared in the swamps of northern Montana 78 million years ago, complete with two Probrachylophosaurs roaming around in the background. Artwork by Fabrizio Lavezzi © Evolutionsmuseet, Knuthenborg
June 20 (UPI) — U.S. scientists announced Thursday the discovery of a new species of horned dinosaur that, at 11,000 pounds and 22 feet long, is the largest centrosaurine ever found in North America and roamed the swamps of what is now Montana’s Badlands during the late Cretaceous period 78 million flight. before.
The new dinosaur was identified and subsequently christened Lokiceratops rangiformis by Colorado State University adjunct faculty member Joseph Sertich and University of Utah professor Mark Loewen due to the showy set of curved blade-like horns on the back of its “collar” and the asymmetrical horn that has drawn comparisons to caribou antlers, Colorado State University she said in a press release.
The find, detailed in a peer-reviewed study published in the scientific journal PeerJ, is named after Loki, the mythological horned Norse god and his descendant Triceratops, and roughly translates to “Loki’s horned face that looks like a caribou.” .”
“The dinosaur now has a permanent home in Denmark, so we went with a Norse god, and in the end it doesn’t really look like Loki with curved blades?” said Loewen, co-author and paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Co-author and paleontologist Sertich of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who spoke as the replica went on public display at the museum, said: “It’s one of those happy-ending stories where it didn’t wander into someone’s mansion. in a museum where it will be preserved forever for people to study and enjoy visiting.”
The original is on permanent display at the Museum of Evolution on the Danish island of Lolland, south of Copenhagen, Denmark, where both men are scientific consultants.
Sertich and Loewen reconstructed the head and collar/horn assemblage from plate-sized and smaller bone fragments found in 2019 in northern Montana, south of the Canadian border.
Once they put the skull back together, they realized they had a new species of dinosaur, the largest North American find of a group of horned dinosaurs called centrosaurines.
It has the largest ciliated horns ever seen on a horned dinosaur, but lacks the nasal horn common to most centrosaurines.
“This new dinosaur pushes against the bizarre headgear of a ceratopsian with the largest frilled horns ever seen on a ceratopsian,” Sertich said.
“These skull ornaments are one of the keys to unlocking the diversity of horned dinosaurs and show that evolutionary selection for showy displays contributed to the dizzying richness of Cretaceous ecosystems.”
Locicertatops’ elaborate headdress, as imposing as it appears, had more to do with show off and nothing to do with ferocity, as it was, like Triceraptops, a harmless plant-eater.
Comparing dinosaur horns to bird feathers, Sertich noticed how they evolved distinct colors and patterns to differentiate the species they belonged to from other similar bird species.
“We think that the horns of these dinosaurs were analogous to what birds do with displays. They use them either to choose a mate or to recognize species,” he said.
Lokiceratops was excavated from the same rock layer as four other dinosaur species, suggesting that all five lived 78 million years ago in the swamps and coastal plains along the east coast of what was then the Mid-Continent Sea, three of which were closely related. but it is only found in this area.
“It’s an unheard of diversity to find five living together, similar to what you would see on the plains of East Africa today with different horned ungulates,” Sertich said.
The discovery of Loki is evidence that the three species appeared in a relatively short period of time but were geographically restricted to this distinct locale—a process often seen in birds on islands or otherwise isolated habitats—as opposed to the wide variety of mammals such as moose now found throughout the western United States.
However, these regional differences were evened out by the end of the Cretaceous era, and only two species of horned dinosaurs remained from Canada to Mexico, which Sertich suggests may have been due to regional differences in climatic conditions being replaced by a homogeneous climate.
The end of the Cretaceous period marked the end of the horned dinosaurs, and indeed the dinosaur era itself, with the Chicxulub impactor, when a 7-mile-wide asteroid slammed into the northern coast of what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula at 45,000 mph. -hour.
The study offers the most comprehensive genealogy of horned dinosaurs and shows that there was much more diversity among dinosaurs than previously known.
“Lokiceratops helps us understand that we are only scratching the surface of the diversity and relationships in the horned dinosaur family tree,” Loewen said.