The Triceraptops has added to it’s family tree, with a 78-million-year-old ancestor found in a new discovery, called Lokiceratops rangiformis.
The new dinosaur has been named after the Marvel character Loki, so even if he was bitter about his brother Thor’s achievements, he now has this under his belt.
The Lokiceratops rangiformis, identified and named by Joseph Sertich (Colorado State university) and Mark Loewen (University of Utah), translates roughly to ‘Loki’s horned face that looks like a caribou’.
The two faculty members co-authored the study and called the new species Lokiceratops rangiformis (lo-kee-sare-a-tops), over the beast’s curved blade-like horns on the back of the bone that sits at the back of the skull. The asymmetrical horns are similar to caribou antlers.
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The new dino has been announced in the scientific journal, PeerJ.
As the ancient beast was found in Denmark they wanted to incorporate Norse mythology into the naming of the dinosaur.
Loewen, palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum of Utah, said: “The dinosaur now has a permanent home in Denmark, so we went with a Norse god, and in the end, doesn’t it just really look like Loki with the curving blades?”
“It’s one of those stories with a happy ending, where it didn’t go to somebody’s mansion,” Sertich, palaeontologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, said. “It ended up in a museum, where it will be preserved forever so people can study it and enjoy visiting it.”
Lokiceratops rangiformis was put together with tiny fragments
Discovered in 2019, in the badlands of Montana, the two scientists reconstructed the dino from bone fragments that were roughly the size of dinner planets or smaller.
When they managed to piece together the skull, they realized it was an entirely new dinosaur – so the Lokiceratops rangiformis was born.
It’s believed it weighed a chunky 11,000 pounds or five metric tonnes and was 22 feet or 6.7 meters long.
“This new dinosaur pushes the envelope on bizarre ceratopsian headgear, sporting the largest frill horns ever seen in a ceratopsian,” Sertich said.
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“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.”
It’s estimated it was the larges specimen of the horned dino group, centrosaurines, ever found in North America.
Scientists say it has the largest frill horns ever seen in the group, but didn’t have the nose horn others had. But they think the horns were similar to birds, used for selecting a mate and distinguishing other species.
The fossils were found in the same rock layer as four other species, which could mean they lived in harmony 78 million years ago in the plains and swamps at the time.
Sertich added: “It’s unheard-of diversity to find five living together, similar to what you would see on the plains of East Africa today with different horned ungulates.”
He adds it could mean the species evolved rapidly within a small area, similar to birds, because they were limited to that geographic area.
The paeleontologist explained when Triceratops roamed the planet 12 million years later, only two species of horned dinosaurs were present from Canada to Mexico.
“Lokiceratops [rangiformis] helps us understand that we only are scratching the surface when it comes to the diversity and relationships within the family tree of horned dinosaurs,” Loewen added.
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