A new species of dinosaur with unusually ornate horns on its head and behind its neck lived along with at least four other species of rhinoceros or elephant-type dinosaurs 78 million years ago in what is now northern Montana, researcher Joseph Sertich said.
Sertich, an associate faculty member at Colorado State University, and University of Utah professor Mark Loewen identified and named the new species “Lokiceratops rangiformis.” The identification and name were announced Thursday in the scientific journal PeerJ.
Lokiceratops is from the same family of horned dinosaurs as Triceratops “but from the other side of the family tree; more like a cousin,” Sertich said in a telephone interview with the Coloradoan from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, where the paleontologist works as a research scientist.
Its discovery, by combining bones found in 2019 by a team of commercial paleontologists, provides the first evidence anywhere in the world of five different species of large rhinoceros or elephant-type dinosaurs coexisting in the same place at the same time. Sertich said. The bones of all five were found in the same rock layer in northern Montana and southern parts of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Sertich and Loewen reported in their study.
The region, they wrote, was a geographically limited area of swamps and coastal plains along the east coast of Laramidia, the western landmass of North America, created when a seaway split the continent. Three species – Lokiceratops, Albertaceratops, and Medusaceratops – were closely related but not found outside of this area.
“These animals are closely related, but they have different displays, similar to what you would see in an antelope in East Africa, where you have several related species but with different head coverings,” Sertich said.
Sertich and Loewen helped reconstruct the dinosaur from bone fragments the size of dinner plates and smaller, according to an article published Thursday in the Source, an online publication of CSU’s marketing and communications team. Once they put the skull back together, they realized they had discovered a new species of dinosaur.
The name Lokiceratops was chosen out of respect for Denmark, where the reconstructed bones are permanently displayed. Loewen suggested that the dinosaur looked like the Norse god Loki, known for his horned helmet. Replicas made from bone casts are on display at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City, where Loewen is a resident researcher, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
Estimates suggest that Lokiceratops, a plant-eater, was 22 feet long and weighed about 11,000 pounds. It is the largest dinosaur from a group of horned dinosaurs called centrosaurines ever found in North America, and it has the largest and most ornate horns on the collar—the structure that protrudes from the neck between the head and torso—ever found on a horned dinosaur. . Unlike other species in this dinosaur family, Lokiceratops does not have a nasal horn.
Other unique features, Sertich said, are symmetrical pairs of spikes pointing in opposite directions bound between “a pair of gigantic, flat, blade-like horns” and horns above the eyes that “drop to the side.”
He compared the different horn structures and displays to the different colors and patterns of feathers found on different but similar species of birds.
“We think the horns on these dinosaurs were analogous to what birds do with displays,” Source said. “They use them either to select males or to recognize species.”
Lokiceratops lived about 12 million years before the more common Triceratops, which is believed to have evolved as a more homogeneous species of the various horned dinosaur species found in North America.
Sertich said he was involved in the discovery of more than 20 different species of dinosaurs. In a CSU paleontology class he took in 2022 in New Mexico, he dug up the intact skull of another horned dinosaur, a pentaceratops with five horns instead of the three found on a triceratops.
He began working on Lokiceratops while teaching at CSU, where he is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Geosciences in the Warner College of Natural Resources. He was curator of dinosaurs at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for 11 years before moving to his current position at the Smithsonian. Raised in Colorado, he earned a bachelor’s degree in geology, biology and zoology from CSU in 2004.
Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest to Coloradoans. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com,x.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.