Artist’s impression of Lokiceratops encountering a crocodilian in the 78-million-year-old swamps of northern Montana
©Andrey Atuchin for the Museum of Evolution in Maribo, Denmark.
A newly discovered relative of Triceratops had a unique array of head ornaments, including the largest frill horns ever seen on a horned dinosaur.
The fossil remains of the dinosaur were found in 2019 on private property near the US/Canada border in Montana. They were purchased by the Museum of Evolution in Denmark, where they are currently on display.
It is thought that the creature lived around 78 million years ago and would have been about 6.7 metres long, weighing around 5 tonnes.
Lokiceratops rangiformis, as it has been named, had two long horns at the front of its head as well as three main horns on the frill at the back of its head. The largest frill horns, positioned on each side of the skull, were flat, broad and curving in a scimitar-like shape.
They were probably used for display rather than defence, says Joseph Sertich at Colorado State University, and measured more than 60 centimetres long on their outer curve. “By absolute volume and length, Lokiceratops had the largest frill horns ever seen,” says Sertich.
When it lived, about 12 million years before its most famous relative Triceratops, its home in what is now the western part of North America was an island continent named Laramidia.
Several other dinosaurs from the Ceratopsid family have been found in the same fossil assemblage. “This is the first interval where five horned dinosaurs have been found living at the same place and time,” says Sertich.
Mark Loewen at the University of Utah coined the name of the fossil after the Norse god Loki because its permanent home is now Denmark. The species name, rangiformis, refers to the resemblance between the dinosaur’s asymmetric middle-frill horns and the asymmetric front tines, or branches, of reindeer antlers.
“Many modern deer have asymmetrical antlers,” says Loewen. “We also know that asymmetry is not uncommon in horned dinosaurs, but it is striking in Lokiceratops.”
Erich Fitzgerald at Museums Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, says the discovery reveals the extraordinary biodiversity of the Ceratopsid dinosaurs that evolved in the Late Cretaceous epoch of western North America.
“This research really accentuates the difference between the rich-horned dinosaur fauna of 80 to 70 million years ago, with that of the end-Cretaceous times, some 66 to 68 million years ago – when Triceratops dominated a lower-diversity fauna of horned behemoths,” says Fitzgerald.
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