Montana dinosaur named
Anew, spectacularly adorned dinosaur found in Montana has been named Lokiceratops rangiformis by Mark Loewen and colleagues in the journal PeerJ. It is a ceratopsid – a four-legged, horned plant-eater akin to Triceratops – from the Late Cretaceous, 78 million years ago.
Ceratopsids are famous for the bony frill that projects from the rear of the skull as well as for their nose and brow horns. Lokiceratops lacks a nose horn, has a pair of asymmetrical spikes on the frill midline and a pair of gigantic, curved, blade-like spikes on the frill’s upper edge. “This new dinosaur pushes the envelope on bizarre ceratopsid headgear, sporting the largest frill horns ever seen in a ceratopsid,” says Joseph Sertich of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Colorado State University. The new dinosaur’s name credits the horned god Loki of Norse mythology and also makes a nod to the ornate anatomy of reindeer, meaning ‘Loki’s horned face, resembling a caribou’.
The single Lokiceratops specimen was discovered in the rocks of the Judith River Formation in Kennedy Coulee, Montana, close to the US-Canada border, in 2019.
In terms of its placement in the ceratopsid family tree, Lokiceratops is a centrosaurine, and thus close to shortfrilled Pachyrhinosaurus and spiky-frilled Styracosaurus. This makes it the latest addition to a cast marked by a surprising increase in diversity. In 1990, scientists recognised just eight centrosaurine species – around 30 are known today. Several centrosaurine species inhabited the same community, since it lived alongside at least three others. All differed in the anatomy of their horns and frills. So far as we know, these animals were highly endemic, meaning they were unique to a relatively small geographical area.