Named\u00a0Lokiceratops rangiformis<\/em>\u00a0by\u00a0Mark\u00a0Loewen and colleagues in the open access journal\u00a0PeerJ<\/em>, the new dinosaur is a ceratopsid \u2013 a four-legged, horned plant-eater akin to\u00a0Triceratops<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 from 78 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous.\u00a0<\/p> Ceratopsids are famous for the bony frill that projects backwards and upwards from the rear of the skull as well as for their nose and brow horns.\u00a0<\/p> Lokiceratops<\/em>\u00a0lacks a nose horn entirely, has a pair of asymmetrical spikes on the frill midline,\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0a pair of gigantic, curved, blade-like spikes on the frill\u2019s upper edge. <\/p> \u201cThis new dinosaur pushes the envelope on bizarre ceratopsid headgear, sporting the largest frill horns ever seen in a ceratopsid,\u201d said team member Joseph Sertich of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Colorado State University. <\/p> The new dinosaur\u2019s name credits the horned god Loki of Norse mythology and also makes a nod to the ornate anatomy of reindeer<\/a>, meaning \u2018Loki\u2019s horned face, resembling a caribou\u2019.<\/p> The single\u00a0Lokiceratops<\/em>\u00a0specimen was discovered in the rocks of the Judith River Formation in the badlands of Kennedy Coulee in Montana, close to the US-Canada border, in 2019. <\/p> Montana in the time of\u00a0Lokiceratops<\/em>\u00a0looked very different from today. Tropical swamps and forests covered a continent, termed Laramidia, that extended from Mexico to Alaska. A warm, shallow sea separated Laramidia from landmasses to the east.\u00a0<\/p> In terms of its placement in the ceratopsid family tree,\u00a0Lokiceratops<\/em>\u00a0is a centrosaurine, and thus close to short-frilled, deep-nosed\u00a0Pachyrhinosaurus<\/em>\u00a0and spiky-frilled\u00a0Styracosaurus<\/em>. This makes it the latest addition to a cast marked by a surprising increase in diversity. <\/p> In 1990, scientists recognised just eight centrosaurine species, whereas around 30 are known today. Their family tree has gone from sparse and simple to complex, with numerous branches.\u00a0<\/p> Lokiceratops<\/em>\u00a0belongs to the newly named Albertaceratopsini, a group whose members possess hook-shaped spikes on the top edge of the frill and long, widely divergent brow horns. They were generally around 6 m (20 ft) long as adults.<\/p> Another point that\u00a0Lokiceratops<\/em>\u00a0reinforces is that 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. <\/p> So far as we know, these animals were highly endemic, meaning that they were unique to a relatively small geographical area. \u201cThe endemism present in centrosaurines is greater than in any other group of dinosaurs,” said University of Utah team member Savhannah Carpenter.\u00a0<\/p> If this high endemism was true of centrosaurines in northern Montana, it could have been true of other places where this group occurred. And a broader consequence of this is that centrosaurine diversity as whole, and even Cretaceous dinosaur diversity as a whole, could have been underestimated.<\/p> Artwork: Reconstruction of\u00a0Lokiceratops\u00a0in the 78-million-year-old swamps of northern Montana, USA. Credit:\u00a0Sergey Krasovskiy for the Museum of Evolution in Maribo, Denmark<\/em><\/p> More on dinosaurs:<\/strong><\/p> With a colossal pair of blade-like spikes on the back of its frill, Lokiceratops rangiformis is one of the largest and most ornate horned dinosaurs ever found, say scientists. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":39665,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"4"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2024\/06\/new-giant-dinosaur-with-bizarre-horns-discovered-in-the-wild-badlands-of-montana.jpg",1425,950,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2024\/06\/new-giant-dinosaur-with-bizarre-horns-discovered-in-the-wild-badlands-of-montana-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2024\/06\/new-giant-dinosaur-with-bizarre-horns-discovered-in-the-wild-badlands-of-montana-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2024\/06\/new-giant-dinosaur-with-bizarre-horns-discovered-in-the-wild-badlands-of-montana-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2024\/06\/new-giant-dinosaur-with-bizarre-horns-discovered-in-the-wild-badlands-of-montana-1024x683.jpg",800,534,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2024\/06\/new-giant-dinosaur-with-bizarre-horns-discovered-in-the-wild-badlands-of-montana.jpg",1425,950,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2024\/06\/new-giant-dinosaur-with-bizarre-horns-discovered-in-the-wild-badlands-of-montana.jpg",1425,950,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcwildlife\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"With a colossal pair of blade-like spikes on the back of its frill, Lokiceratops rangiformis is one of the largest and most ornate horned dinosaurs ever found, say scientists.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcwildlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/39664"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcwildlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcwildlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcwildlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcwildlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcwildlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcwildlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Lokiceratops](\"https:\/\/c02.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/62\/2024\/06\/Lokiceratops-dinosaur-scaled.jpg\")
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