Meet Loki: The Newfound Ornate Horned Dinosaur
Lokiceratops once roamed around a lake in what’s now the badlands of Montana
Paleontologists will come up with the littlest differences to distinguish their latest discovery from other dinosaurs—longest tail, biggest toe, sharpest claw, whatever works to draw attention to the science. And that’s great. The findings can be very meaningful to the experts and super interesting to serious dinosaur fans. But some people show up mostly for the awesome renderings. This discovery checks both boxes.
The newfound species of “horned, plant-eating dinosaur” is being billed as “among the largest and most ornate” of its kind. Allowing that we don’t know for sure what colors dinosaurs sported, the claim seems fair enough.
Lokiceratops, as it’s been named, is the fourth centrosaurine found in the badlands of northern Montana, a few miles from the Canadian border.
“This new dinosaur pushes the envelope on bizarre ceratopsian headgear, sporting the largest frill horns ever seen in a ceratopsian,” said Joseph Sertich, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Colorado State University. “These skull ornaments are one of the keys to unlocking horned dinosaur diversity and demonstrate that evolutionary selection for showy displays contributed to the dizzying richness of Cretaceous ecosystems.”
The newfound dino’s full name is Lokiceratops rangiformis, which means “Loki’s horned face that looks like a caribou,” an homage to Loki, the blade-wielding Norse god. It was as long as full-sized SUV, about 22 feet (6.7 meters), and weighed as much as two of them, around 11,000 pounds (5 metric tonnes).
More than 78 million years ago, the horned beast lived in swamps and floodplains along the shore of an ancient island continent called Laramidia. Lokiceratops preceded its well-known cousin, Triceratops, by at least 12 million years, Sertich and his colleagues report this week in the journal PeerJ.
