A new, spectacularly decorated dinosaur has been named after Montana, and it’s part of a rapidly evolving story that shows strong region-specific evolution in this group of giant herbivores.
Called Lokiceratops rangiformis by Mark Loewen and colleagues in the open access journal PeerJthe new dinosaur is a ceratopsid – a four-legged, horned herbivore that resembles Triceratops – from 78 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous.
Ceratopsids are known for the bony collar that extends backwards and upwards from the back of the skull, as well as their nasal and brow horns.
Lokiceratops completely missing a rhinoceros, has a few asymmetrical points on the centerline of the fringe, And a pair of gigantic, curved, leaf-like points at the upper edge of the collar.
“This new dinosaur pushes the boundaries of bizarre ceratopsid headgear, with the largest frilled horns ever seen on a ceratopsid,” said team member Joseph Sertich of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Colorado State University.
The new dinosaur’s name takes its name from the horned god Loki from Norse mythology and also makes a nod to the graceful anatomy of reindeer, meaning “Loki’s horned face, which resembles a caribou.”
The single Lokiceratops specimen was discovered in 2019 in the rocks of the Judith River Formation in the badlands of Montana’s Kennedy Coulee, close to the US-Canada border.
Montana in the time of Lokiceratops looked very different than today. Tropical swamps and forests covered a continent called Laramidia, which stretched from Mexico to Alaska. A warm, shallow sea separated Laramidia from the landmasses to the east.
As for its placement in the ceratopsid family tree, Lokiceratops is a centrosaurine and therefore almost has a short fringe and a deep nose Pachyrhinosaurus and spiky ruffles Styracosaurus. This makes it the latest addition to a cast marked by a surprising increase in diversity.
In 1990, scientists recognized only eight centrosaurine species, while today about thirty are known. Their family tree has gone from sparse and simple to complex, with countless branches.
Lokiceratops belongs to the newly named Albertaceratopsini, a group whose members possess hooked points on the upper edge of the frill and long, highly divergent brow horns. As adults they were generally about 6 meters long.
One more point that Lokiceratops What is reinforced is that different species of centrosaurine lived in the same community, as these lived alongside at least three others. They all differed in the anatomy of their horns and fringes.
As far as we know, these animals were highly endemic, meaning they were unique to a relatively small geographic area. “Endemism in centrosaurines is greater than in any other group of dinosaurs,” said Savhannah Carpenter, a team member from the University of Utah.
If this high endemism was true for centrosaurines in northern Montana, it could also have been true for other places where this group occurred. And a broader consequence of this is that the diversity of centrosaurine as a whole, and even the diversity of Cretaceous dinosaurs as a whole, could have been underestimated.
Artwork: Reconstruction of Lokiceratops in the 78-million-year-old swamps of northern Montana, USA. Credit: Sergey Krasovskiy for the Museum of Evolution in Maribo, Denmark
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