A new species of dinosaur, with unusually graceful horns on its head and behind its neck, lived with at least four other species of rhino- or elephant-like dinosaurs 78 million years ago in what is now northern Montana, researcher Joseph Sertich said.
Sertich, an affiliate faculty member at Colorado State University, and Professor Mark Loewen of the University of Utah identified and named the new species “Lokiceratops rangiformis.” The identification and name were announced on Thursday in the scientific journal PeerJ.
Lokiceratops is from the same family of horned dinosaurs as triceratops “but from the opposite side of the family tree; more of a cousin,” Sertich said in a telephone interview with the Coloradoan from a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, where the paleontologist works as a research associate.
Its discovery, by piecing together 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-like dinosaurs coexisting at the same time in the same location. Sertich said. Bones from all five have been found in the same rock layer in northern Montana and the southern part of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Sertich and Loewen reported in their study.
That area, they wrote, was a geographically limited area of swamps and coastal plains along the eastern coast of Laramidia, the western landmass of North America that formed when a seaway divided the continent. Three of the species – Lokiceratops, Albertaceratops and Medusaceratops – were closely related, but were not found outside that region.
“These animals are closely related, but they have different characteristics, similar to what you would see in antelopes in, say, East Africa, where you have multiple related species but with different headgear,” Sertich said.
Sertich and Loewen helped reconstruct the dinosaur from bone fragments the size of dinner plates and smaller, according to a story published Thursday in Source, an online publication of CSU’s marketing and communications team. Once they put the skull together, they realized they had discovered a new species of dinosaur.
The name Lokiceratops was chosen in deference to Denmark, where the reconstructed bones are on permanent display. Loewen suggested that the dinosaur resembled the Norse god Loki, known for his horned helmet. Replicas made from casts of the bones can be seen at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City, where Loewen is a research associate, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
Estimates suggest that Lokiceratops, a herbivore, was 20 feet long and weighed about 11,000 pounds. It is the largest dinosaur from the group of horned dinosaurs called centrosaurines ever found in North America, and has the largest and most ornate horns on its ruff – the structure that extends from its neck between the head and torso – once found on a horned dinosaur. . Unlike other species from that dinosaur family, Lokiceratops does not have a rhinoceros.
Other unique features, Sertich said, include a symmetrical pair of points pointing in opposite directions, bound between “a pair of giant, flat, leaf-like horns,” and horns over its eyes that “hang to the side.”
He compared the different horn structures and appearances to the different feather colors and patterns found in different but similar bird species.
“We think these dinosaurs’ horns were analogous to what birds do with displays,” he told Source. “They use them for male selection or species recognition.”
Lokiceratops lived about 12 million years before the more common triceratops, which he believes evolved as a more homogeneous genus 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. A CSU paleontology class he took in 2022 during a dig in New Mexico unearthed 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 on the faculty of Geosciences at the Warner College of Natural Resources. He was curator of dinosaurs at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for eleven years before taking his current position at the Smithsonian. He grew up in Colorado and 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 the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com,x.com/KellyLyell And facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.