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For more than a year, visitors to the Museum of Evolution in Maribo, Denmark, have been in for a treat: admiring a previously unknown dinosaur species that had no name.
The sign next to the animal’s large, beautifully decorated skull – reminiscent of a Triceratops – simply read: “New dinosaur examined, stay tuned!”
Now, five years after the specimen’s discovery, that dinosaur finally has a name: Lokiceratops rangiformis.
“This was found in northern Montana, about three miles south of the U.S.-Canada border,” said Joseph Sertich, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Colorado State University, and co-leader of the study that found this findings revealed. published on Thursday in the journal PeerJ.
“It is an area known for the production of horned dinosaurs. In fact, there are four other species of horned dinosaurs known from this specific region,” Sertich said. “So when we started working on it, we assumed it would be one of those four. We were completely shocked to discover that it was a completely new species.”
A success story’
The fossil was found in an area of North America that was separated from the rest of the continent when Lokiceratops lived, about 78 million years ago, forming a large island called Laramidia. According to the new research, the dinosaur lived among similar horned species in swamps and floodplains along the eastern shore of the island.
“The fossil was discovered in 2019 on private property by Mark Eatman, a commercial paleontologist,” says Sertich. “He goes out, he digs up fossils and eventually sells them.”
Eatman has unearthed other important specimens in the past, including one of the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever discovered. He found that fossil was entangled with a Triceratops, hence the nickname “dueling dinosaurs.” First spotted in 2006, it was purchased by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh after several attempts to sell it to private buyers and legal battles over its status. The museum put it on display at the end of April.
Lokiceratops is a “success story,” Sertich said, because a museum bought it (for an undisclosed sum) right out of the ground. “These fossils often disappear into private hands. As scientists we don’t know where they go, they just disappear. The public doesn’t get to see them, scientists can’t study them, new species don’t get new names. They are effectively lost,” he said.
“But not in this case. When it ends up in a museum, a fossil can be studied by scientists forever and ever. And it will also be on display for the public to see and enjoy.”
Lokiceratops has been on display at the Museum of Evolution since March 2023. The specimen was nicknamed Loki, which foretold its full taxonomic name – Lokiceratops rangiformis – which is both a tribute to the Norse god Loki and a reference to the series of shapes found on a dinosaur’s skull, the telltale sign that it was a species was completely new to science.
“At first it looked like a well-known dinosaur called Medusaceratops. But when we reassembled the skull, the number of horns and the shape of the horns indicated that it was a different species,” Sertich said, noting that the horns show an asymmetry that we find today in the antlers of caribou and reindeer.
A Triceratops cousin
Lokiceratops has obvious similarities to the famous Triceratops, but the newly named species lived about 12 million years earlier and belongs to a separate lineage, Sertich said. In the same area, fossils of the four other species of similar horned dinosaurs with which it shared its habitat were discovered. Three of them have been named – Medusaceratops, Albertaceratops and Wendiceratiops – and a fourth has an uncertain classification.
“All of these dinosaurs generally look like Triceratops because they have horns on the face,” Sertich said. “Lokiceratops in particular has horns above the eyes like Triceratops, but they curve to the sides instead of pointing forward.”
The other unique feature of horned dinosaurs is the frill, the large shield that extends from the back of the head to over the neck. Different types of horned dinosaurs have different horns along the edge of that collar.
“Triceratops has very small triangular horns, almost unnoticeable,” Sertich said, “but this dinosaur and many of its close relatives have huge, paddle-shaped horns on the back, along with smaller horns on the edges of the collar.”
The fossil belongs to a dinosaur that would have been about the size of a large rhinoceros when it died, Sertich said, and the skull ornaments would have been used to attract a mate, intimidate a rival or, more generally , for identification or recognition among its kind. own kind.
Eatman discovered about 75% of the skull, along with some parts of the hips, limbs and shoulder bones. However, so far only the skull is on display at the Museum of Evolution. It also houses a skeleton of an Allosaurus, a large carnivorous dinosaur similar to T. rex, and attracts about 300,000 visitors a year.
A reproduction of the skull, along with a full head sculpture elaborated with skin and based on what researchers think the dinosaur may have looked like, will go on display beginning Thursday at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Like a heavy metal rocker
Paleontologists who were not involved in the research expressed their excitement about the find.
It’s a remarkable discovery of a dinosaur with a real personality and attitude, says Steve Brusatte, personal chair of paleontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom.
“The headgear looks like something a heavy metal rocker would wear on stage. It belongs to the same group as Triceratops, but has its own style, just like the dozens of other horned dinosaurs recently found,” Brusatte said. “The horns and fringes of these dinosaurs were their identity cards, their billboards for attracting mates and intimidating rivals. And each new discovery seems stranger and stranger than the last.”
Lokiceratops is another notable manifestation of sexual experimentation in dinosaurs, according to David Norman, professor of vertebrate paleobiology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
“The larger and more ornate and perhaps even more colorful the decorations, the more potentially attractive the owner can appear to potential partners,” Norman said. “So, as with the extraordinary birds of paradise, sexual selection can lead to the development of extremely flamboyant, even bizarre, characteristics.”
This study is a very cool description of another late Cretaceous horned dinosaur, and there’s no doubt that it belongs to something new, said Tyler Lyson, a paleontologist and curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. “I am amazed at how many horned dinosaurs, all with beautifully decorated horns and fringes, there were during this period,” he said via email. “The bodies of these horned dinosaurs look very similar, yet their heads are decorated with some sort of wild headgear.”
Similar appendages are found on the heads of horned lizards, Lyson added, except in these horned dinosaurs they are attached to multi-ton bodies.
“It’s also exciting and hopefully inspiring that so many new dinosaurs continue to be discovered here in North America, something that has been intensively researched and explored over the past hundred years,” he said. “Who knows what else is waiting to be discovered.”
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