A new species of dinosaur sporting unusually ornate horns on its head and behind its neck lived 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, a Colorado State University faculty member, and University of Utah professor Mark Lowen identified and named the new species “Lokiceratops rangiformis.” The identification and name were announced Thursday in the scientific journal PeerJ.
Lociceratops is in the same family of horned dinosaurs as Triceratops, “but on the other side of the family tree; more than a cousin,” Sertich said in a telephone interview with the Coloradoan from the Smithsonian Institution for Tropical Studies in Panama, where the paleontologist works as a research associate.
Its discovery, by assembling bones discovered 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 dinosaurs coexisting in the same place at the same time, Sertic said. . The bones of all five were found in the same bedrock in northern Montana and southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, Sertich and Loewen report in their study.
This area, they write, is a geographically restricted area of marshes and coastal plains along the east coast of Laramidia, the western North American landmass created when the seaway split the continent. Three of the species – Lokiceratops, Albertaceratops and Medusaceratops – were closely related but not found outside of this region.
“These animals are closely related, but they have different manifestations, similar to what you would see in antelopes in, say, East Africa, where you have multiple related species but with different hats,” 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 the Source, an online publication of CSU’s marketing and communications team. After assembling the skull, 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. Lowen suggested that the dinosaur resembled the Norse god Loki, known for his horned helmet. Replicas made from casts of the bones are on display at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City, where Lowen is a resident research fellow, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
Estimates suggest that Lokiceratops, a herbivore, was 22 feet long and weighed about 11,000 pounds. It is the largest dinosaur from a group of horned dinosaurs called centrosaurs ever found in North America, and it has the largest and most ornate antlers on its rim – the structure protruding from its neck between its head and torso – ever found on horned dinosaur. Unlike other species in this dinosaur family, Lokiceratops did not have a nasal horn.
Other unique features, Sertich said, are a symmetrical pair of spikes pointing in opposite directions, sandwiched between “a pair of gigantic, flat, blade-like horns” and horns above his eyes that “fall to the side.”
He compared the different structures and appearances of the horns to the different colors and patterns of feathers found in different but similar species of birds.
“We think the horns of these dinosaurs were analogous to what birds do with displays,” he told Source. “They use them either for male selection or for species recognition.”
Lociceratops lived about 12 million years before the more common Triceratops, which he says evolved as a more homogeneous species than the various species of horned dinosaurs 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 on a dig in New Mexico in 2022 dug into an intact skull of another horned dinosaur, a pentaceratops with five horns rather than the three found on a triceratops.
He began working on Lokiceratops while teaching at CSU, where he is a faculty member in the Geosciences Department of the Warner College of Natural Resources. He was curator of dinosaurs at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for 11 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 Lyall covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest to Colorado residents. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com,x.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.
