Lokiceratops rangiformis lived about 78 million years ago, researchers said.
A new species of giant-horned dinosaur has been discovered that scientists 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 partial skeleton – were discovered on private property in Kennedy Coulee, in the Badlands of northern Montana near the US-Canada border.
Lokiceratops belongs to a group of horned dinosaurs known as ceratopsids that evolved in the late Cretaceous period, about 92 million years ago, and survived until the end of the dinosaurs.
Scientists say 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 measured 22 feet in length and weighed about 11,000 pounds. This makes it the largest herbivore in its ecosystem at the time it lived.
According to scientists, the horns are the largest and most ornate ever found in the dinosaur family to which it belongs. The dinosaur does not have a nose horn, but rather two large and asymmetrical horns on each side in the middle of the back collar, as well as a spike in the middle of the collar and more than 20 horns along the collar.
The prominent horns inspired Lokiceratops’ name. The first half pays homage to the Norse god Loki and means “Loki’s horned face”, while rangiformis means “looks like a caribou” in reference to how the dinosaur’s horns resemble caribou horns.
“This is one of the most exciting dinosaurs I’ve had the honor of working on,” said ABC News Dr. Joseph Sertich, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and co-author. “So it has one of the nicest arrays of horns and spikes along the edge of the collar, including the largest proportion of horns ever seen on the edge of the collar, and it’s also the largest member of its group 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 Natural History Museum of Utah and co-author, told ABC News. He said the team had the individual bones of the skull in pieces, rather than having the whole skull intact.
“We put them all on the table and started putting them together,” he said. “It turned out that they clicked together, so they were just broken in the field before they were buried. Interestingly, when we put the skull together, it was very clear that it was a new dinosaur. We saw a dinosaur that no one in the world knew about 78 million years.”
He said scientists compared the bones with 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, showing that several of them lived side by side. The researchers said it also suggests a higher level of dinosaur diversity than previously understood.
“When I started as a paleontologist, we expected to find only two ceratopsians at any given site in western North America,” Loewen said. “What’s interesting is that finding this animal alongside four other different closely related species and a fifth distantly related species is like going to Africa, the Serengeti, and finding five different species of elephants. That’s completely unheard of.”
Loewen said he, his students and his 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 bones of the skull will be on permanent display at the Museum of Evolution in Maribo, Denmark, while a reconstruction of the skull — complete with a full-size statue — will be on display next year at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City. six months.