An artist’s impression of Lokiceratops as it would have looked 78 million years ago in the swamps of northern Montana, complete with two Probrachylophosauruses moving by in the background. Artwork by Fabrizio Lavezzi © Evolutionsmuseet, Knuthenborg
June 20 (UPI) — US scientists on Thursday announced the discovery of a new species of horned dinosaur, which at 11,000 pounds and 6.5 meters long is the largest centrosaurine ever found in North America and that in the late Cretaceous period, 78 million years ago, wandered the swamps of what is now the badlands of Montana. past.
The new dinosaur was identified and subsequently named Lokiceratops rangiformis by Colorado State University fellow Joseph Sertich and University of Utah professor Mark Loewen because of a showy series of curved, blade-like horns on the back of its “fringe” and an asymmetrical horn showing Comparison to caribou antlers, Colorado State University said in a news release.
The find, detailed in a peer-reviewed study published in the scientific journal PeerJ, is named after Loki, a mythological humanoid Norse god with horns and his Triceratops descendant and roughly translates to “Loki’s horned face resembling 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 the curved blades?” said Loewen, co-author and paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City.
As a replica was put on public display at the museum, co-author and paleontologist Sertich of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute said, “It’s one of those stories with a happy ending, where it didn’t go to someone’s mansion. It ended in a museum, where it will be preserved forever, so that people can study it and visit it with pleasure.”
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 advisors.
Sertich and Loewen reconstructed the head and frill/horns sequence from dinner plate-sized bone fragments and smaller bone fragments found in 2019 in northern Montana, just south of the Canadian border.
Once they put the skull together, they realized they had a new dinosaur species, the largest North American find ever from a group of horned dinosaurs called centrosaurines.
It has the largest frilled horns ever seen on a horned dinosaur, but it lacks the rhinoceros common to most centrosaurines.
“This new dinosaur pushes the boundaries of bizarre ceratopsian headgear, with the largest frill horns ever seen on a ceratopsian animal,” says Sertich.
“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 staggering richness of Cretaceous ecosystems.”
As formidable as its appearance is, it appears that Lokicertatops’ elaborate headgear was all about showing off and nothing to do with predation, since, like Triceratops, it was a harmless herbivore.
Comparing dinosaur horns to bird feathers, Sertich noted how they evolved different colors and patterns to distinguish the species they belong to from other similar bird species.
“We think these dinosaurs’ horns were analogous to what birds do with displays. They use them for mate selection or species recognition,” he said.
Lokiceratops was excavated from the same rock layer as four other dinosaur species, indicating that all five lived 78 million years ago in the swamps and coastal plains along the eastern shore of what was then a sea in the center of the continent, three of which were closely related. but only found in that region.
“To see five of them living together is unprecedented diversity, similar to what you would see today on the plains of East Africa with various horned ungulates,” Sertich said.
Loki’s discovery is evidence that these three species appeared within a relatively short period of time, but were geographically restricted to this specific location – a process often observed in birds on islands or otherwise isolated habitats – unlike the wide range of mammals , like elk, now found throughout the western United States.
However, these regional differences had been ironed out by the end of the Cretaceous period, leaving only two species of horned dinosaurs from Canada to Mexico, which Sertich suggests could be due to the fact that regional differences in climatic conditions had been replaced by a homogeneous climate.
The end of the Cretaceous Period marked the end for the horned dinosaurs, and even for the dinosaur age itself, with the Chicxulub impactor when an 11 kilometer wide asteroid traveling at 70,000 kilometers per hour crashed into the northern coast of what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula , struck. -o’clock.
The study both provides the most comprehensive genealogy of horned dinosaurs and shows that there was much greater diversity among dinosaurs than previously thought.
“Lokiceratops helps us understand that we are only scratching the surface when it comes to the diversity and relationships within the horned dinosaur family tree,” says Loewen.