paleontologists have presented in PeerJ magazine the paleontological find of a new species of dinosaur from 78 million years ago with a set of very extravagant horns.
He discovery indicates the name of the dinosaurLokiceratops rangiformis, which roughly translates to “Loki’s horned face that looks like a caribou”, due to the unusual curved, blade-like horns on the back of its frill (the bone shield on the back of the skull ) and the asymmetrical horns at the top of the steering wheel, reminiscent of the antlers of a caribou.
“He dinosaur “Now he has a permanent home in Denmark, so we went with a Norse god, and in the end, doesn’t he look a lot like Loki with the curved swords?” said University of Utah professor and study co-author Mark Loewen, referring to to the trickster god’s favorite weapon.
Loewen, too paleontologist of the Utah Museum of Natural History, and Joseph Sertich, paleontologist of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, are both scientific consultants to the Museum of Evolution in Denmark, the new home of Lokiceratops.
“It’s one of those stories with a happy ending, where he didn’t go to someone’s mansion,” Sertich said. “It ended up in a museum, where it will be preserved forever so people can study it and enjoy visiting it.”
Lokiceratops was discovered in 2019 in the badlands of northern Montana, two miles (3.2 kilometers) south of the United States-Canada border. Sertich and Loewen helped rebuild the dinosaur from fragments the size of dinner plates and smaller. Once they put the pieces of the skull together, they realized that the specimen was a new type of dinosaur.
With an estimated length of 6.7 meters and a weight of 5 tons, Lokiceratops is the dinosaur largest of the group dinosaurs with horns called centrosaurus that have been found in North America. It has the largest frilled horns ever seen on a dinosaur horned and lacks the nasal horn that is characteristic among its relatives.
“This new dinosaur pushes the boundaries of bizarre ceratopsian headdresses, sporting the largest frilled horns ever seen on a ceratopsian,” Sertich said in a news release announcing the dinosaur’s unveiling at the Utah Museum of Natural History, where a replica is exhibited.
“These cranial ornaments are one of the keys to discover the diversity of dinosaurs with horns and demonstrate that evolutionary selection for conspicuous displays contributed to the dizzying richness of Cretaceous ecosystems.
Sertich compared the horns of the dinosaurs with the feathers of the birds. Birds use feather colors and patterns to differentiate their own species from other similar bird species.
“We believe that the horns of these dinosaurs “They were analogous to what birds do with displays,” Sertich said. “They use them for mate selection or species recognition.”
Lokiceratops was excavated from the same rock layer as four other dinosaur species, indicating that five dinosaurs different lived side by side 78 million years ago in the swamps and coastal plains along the eastern coast of Laramidia, the western North American landmass created when a seaway divided the continent. Three of these species were closely related, but were not found outside the region.
“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,” Sertich said.
Unlike the wide range of large wild mammals that roam the western United States today, such as elk, these ancient animals were geographically limited, he added. He discovery of Loki provides evidence that these species evolved rapidly within a small area, a process sometimes seen in birds.
When Triceratops appeared on the scene 12 million years later, regional differences had homogenized into just two species of dinosaurs with antlers from Canada to Mexico, possibly in response to a more homogeneous climate, Sertich said.
The study shows that the diversity of dinosaurs has been underestimated and presents the most complete family tree of the dinosaurs with horns to date.
“Lokiceratops helps us understand that we are only scratching the surface when it comes to diversity and relationships within the animal family tree.” dinosaurs with horns,” Loewen said.
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