A new species of dinosaur with unusually decorated horns on its head and neck lived 78 million years ago along with at least four other species of rhinoceros or elephant dinosaurs in what is now northern Montana, said researcher Joseph Sertich.
Sertich, an associate faculty member at Colorado State University, and Mark Loewen, a professor at the University of Utah, identified and named the new species “Lokiceratops rangiformis.” The identification and name were announced Thursday in the scientific journal PeerJ.
Lokiceratops belongs to the same family of horned dinosaurs as Triceratops, “but from the other side of the family tree; more of a cousin,” Sertich said in a phone interview with the Coloradoan from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, where the paleontologist works as a research associate.
Its discovery, through piecing together bones found by a team of commercial paleontologists in 2019, provides the world’s first evidence that five different species of large rhinoceros or elephant dinosaurs coexisted in the same place at the same time, Sertich said. Bones of all five were 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.
This area, they wrote, was a geographically restricted area of swamps and coastal plains along the east coast of Laramidia, the western landmass of North America that was formed when a sea route divided the continent. Three of the species – Lokiceratops, Albertaceratops and Medusaceratops – were closely related but did not occur outside this region.
“These animals are closely related but have different facial features, similar to what you would see, for example, in antelopes in East Africa, where there are several related species but different headgear,” Sertich said.
Sertich and Loewen helped reconstruct the dinosaur from bone fragments the size of dinner plates and smaller, according to an article 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 out of respect for Denmark, where the reconstructed bones are on permanent display. Loewen said the dinosaur looked like the Norse god Loki, known for his horned helmet. Replicas made from casts of the bones are on display at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City, where Loewen is a research associate, and at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
The herbivore Lokiceratops is estimated to have been 22 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. It has the largest and most elaborate horns on its pronotum – the structure that protrudes from its neck between its head and torso – ever found on a horned dinosaur. Unlike other species in this dinosaur family, Lokiceratops does not have a nasal horn.
Other unique features, according to Sertich, include a symmetrical pair of opposing spines attached between “a pair of gigantic, flat, blade-like horns,” as well as horns above its eyes that “hang down to the sides.”
He compared the different structures and formations of the horns with the different colors and patterns of the feathers of different but similar bird species.
“We think the horns of these dinosaurs resembled what birds do during courtship,” he told Source. “They use them either for male selection or for species recognition.”
Lokiceratops lived about 12 million years before the more common Triceratops, which he believes evolved as a more homogeneous species of the various horned dinosaurs 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 attended a 2022 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 an associate faculty member in the Department of Earth Sciences in the Warner College of Natural Resources. Before taking his current position at the Smithsonian, he was curator of dinosaurs at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for 11 years. He grew up in Colorado and received his bachelor’s degree in geology, biology and zoology from CSU in 2004.
Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com,x.com/KellyLyell And facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.