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A new species of giant-horned dinosaur has been discovered, which researchers say is the “largest and most ornate” of its kind ever discovered, according to a study published Thursday in the journal PeerJ.

Fossils of the dinosaur, called Lokiceratops rangiformis – including a skull and partial skeleton – were found on private land at Kennedy Cooley, in the northern Montana badlands near the US-Canada border.

Lociceratops belongs to a group of horned dinosaurs known as ceratopsids that evolved during the late Cretaceous period, about 92 million years ago, and survived until the end of the dinosaurs.

Researchers said Lociceratops was a plant-eating dinosaur that lived in the swamps and floodplains of present-day Montana about 78 million years ago and was a cousin of the infamous Triceratops.

Lociceratops is estimated to have measured 22 feet long and weighed around 11,000 pounds. This makes it the largest living herbivore in its ecosystem.

The horns are the largest and most ornate ever found in the dinosaur family it belongs to, according to researchers. The dinosaur did not have a nasal horn, but rather two large and asymmetrical horns on each side of the middle of the back of the steer, as well as a spike in the middle of the steer and more than 20 horns along the steer.

The distinctive horns inspired the name Lociceratops. The first half pays homage to the Norse god Loki and means “the horned face of Loki”, while rangiformis means “caribou-like” in reference to how the dinosaur’s horns resemble those of caribou.

“This is one of the most exciting dinosaurs I’ve ever had the privilege of working on,” Dr. Joseph Sertich, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and a co-author, told ABC News. “So it has one of the finest sets of horns and spines along its rim, including the largest proportion of horn ever seen on a rim, and it’s also the largest member of its group of horned dinosaurs — one of the largest ever found in North America.”

The fossils were discovered in 2019 and were cleaned, restored and mounted in Pleasant Grove, Utah. Dr. Mark Lowen, a paleontologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History and co-author, told ABC News. He said the team had individual bones from the skull in pieces, not a whole intact skull.

“We put them all on one table and started putting them together,” he said. “It turned out that they clicked together, so they were just broken in the field before they were buried. Interestingly, as we assembled the skull, it became very clear that this was a new dinosaur. We were seeing a dinosaur that no one in the world knew about for 78 million years.”

He said researchers compared the bones to those of dinosaurs in museums around the world to confirm it was a new species.

Lociceratops is the fifth ceratopsid dinosaur to be identified from this region of North America, indicating that several of them lived side by side. The researchers said it also indicates a higher level of dinosaur diversity than previously understood.

“When I started as a paleontologist, we expected to find only two ceratopsians at any given time in any place in western North America,” Lowen said. “What’s interesting is, finding this animal next to four different closely related species and a fifth distantly related species is like going to Africa, in the Serengeti, and finding five different species of elephants.” This is completely unheard of.”

Loewen said he, his students and colleagues hope to find more specimens in more areas to understand the relationships between Lokiceratops and its closely related species and how they lived.

The bones of the skull will be on permanent display at the Museum of Evolution in Maribo, Denmark, while a reconstruction of the skull – with a full-size sculpture – will be on display at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City for the next six months.