A new species of dinosaur, with 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 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 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, by combining 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 place at the same time . Sertich said. The 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.
That area, they wrote, was a geographically limited area of marshes and coastal plains along the east coast of Laramidia, the western North American landmass created when a seaway split the continent. Three of the species – Lokiceratops, Albertaceratops and Medusaceratops – were closely related but not found outside that region.
“These animals are closely related, but they look different, similar to what you would see in antelope in, say, East Africa, where you have many 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 putting parts of the skull together, they realized they had discovered a new species of dinosaur.
The name Lokiceratops was chosen in honor of Denmark, where the reconstructed bones are permanently exhibited. Loewen suggested that the dinosaur looked like the Norse god, Loki, known for his horned helmet. Copies made from casts of the bones are on display at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City, where Loewen is a resident research associate, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
Estimates suggest that Lokiceratops, a plant-eater, was 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, and it has the largest and most ornate horns on its end – the structure that protrudes from the neck between the head and torso – found sometimes in a horned dinosaur. . Unlike other species in that dinosaur family, Lokiceratops did not have a nose horn.
Other unique features, Sertich said, are a pair of symmetrical spikes pointing in opposite directions sandwiched between “a pair of giant, flat, blade-like horns” and horns above his eyes that “hang sideways.”
He compared the different structures and appearances of the horn 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 are doing with screens,” he told Source. “They’re using them for either male selection or 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 types of 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 took on a dig in New Mexico in 2022 dug into 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 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 moving to 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.
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