A new species of dinosaur, sporting unusually ornate horns on its head and behind its neck, was living alongside 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 affiliate 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 the triceratops “but from the other side of the family tree; more of a cousin,” Sertich said in a phone interview with the Coloradoan from a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, where the paleontologist is working as a research associate.
Its discovery, through the piecing together of 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 location at the same time, Sertich said. Bones of all five have been found in the same layer of rock in northern Montana and the southern portion of the Canadians provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Sertich and Loewen reported in their study.
That area, they wrote, was a geographically restricted area of swamps and coastal plains along the eastern shore of Laramidia, the western landmass of North America created when a seaway divided the continent. Three of the species — Lokiceratops, Albertaceratops and Medusaceratops — were closely related but not found outside of that region.
“These animals are closely related, but they have different displays, similar to what you’d see in antelope 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 pieced 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 permanently on display. Loewen suggested the dinosaur looked the Norse god, Loki, known for its horned helmet. Replicas made from casts of the bones are on display at Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City, where Loewen is a resident research associate, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
Estimates suggest Lokiceratops, a plant-eater, was 22 feet long and weighed about 11,000 pounds. It’s 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 frill — the structure protruding from its neck between the head and torso — ever found on a horned dinosaur. Unlike other species in that family of dinosaurs, Lokiceratops does not have a nose horn.
Other unique features, Sertich said, are a symmetric pair of spikes pointing in opposite directions bound between “a pair of gigantic, flat, bladelike horns,” and horns over its eyes that “droop off to the side.”
He likened the different horn structures and displays to the various feather colors and patterns found on different but similar species of birds.
“We think that the horns on these dinosaurs were analogous to what birds are doing with displays,” he told Source. “They’re using them either for male selection or species recognition.”
Lokiceratops lived about 12 million years before the more common triceratops, which he believes developed as a more homogenous species of the various horned dinosaur species found in North America.
Sertich said he has been involved in the discovery of more than 20 different species of dinosaurs. A CSU paleontology class he took on a dig in New Mexico in 2022 dug up in intact skull of another horned dinosaur, a pentaceratops with five horns rather than the three found on a triceratops.
He started working on Lokiceratops while teaching at CSU, where he is an affiliate faculty member in the Geosciences department of the Warner College of Natural Resources. He was the dinosaur curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for 11 years before moving into his current position with the Smithsonian. He grew up in Colorado and received 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 for the Coloradoan. Contact him at [email protected], x.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.
Daisy Hips is a science communicator who brings the wonders of the natural world to readers. Her articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to environmental conservation. Daisy is also an advocate for science education and enjoys stargazing in her spare time.
