What was the new dinosaur called Lokiceratops discovered in Montana like?
The new dinosaur named Lokiceratops was unearthed in Montana and is now housed in Denmark. Find out more about the creature named after the Norse god Loki.
A new dinosaur, whose fossils were unearthed in the badlands of Montana, is now on display at the Museum of Evolution in Denmark, which bought the skeleton in 2021. The discovery of the fossils was recently published in the journal PeerJ.
The animal is believed by paleontologists to be a newly identified horned dinosaur from the Cretaceous Period, which took place some 80 million years ago.
Scientists have named the dinosaur Lokiceratops rangiformis after the Norse god Loki, who recently became famous thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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What was the new dinosaur called Lokiceratops discovered in Montana like?
The herbivore dinosaur measures 20 feet long and is estimated to have weighed five tons. It had a pair of 12-inch blade-shaped horns on its head, with another two that were 16-inches long above its eyes.
The horns are similar to the blades on Loki’s helmet, thus the name Lokiceratops. Rangiformis is a nod to the asymmetrical form of the dinosaur’s horns.
Aside from the impressive horns dominating the dinosaur’s face, there were also more than twelve smaller frill horns surrounding the animal’s head.
Some skeptical scientists believe the creature is simply another type of ceratopsidae, the dinosaur family to which the famous triceratops belongs.
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Lokiceratops’ frill horns spell the difference
However, the authors of the study insist it is a whole new type of dinosaur, judging by the frill horns it possesses.
“While some paleontologists may argue that Lokiceratops is a variant of another dinosaur it lived alongside… the number of frill horns is dramatically different,” posted Joseph Sertich, a Colorado State University affiliate professor who co-wrote the study.
On his Instagram post, he clarified that that Lokiceratops had 12 to 14 possible frill horns, while its contemporary Medusaceratops had only 10.
He further explains that Loki’s fossils have shown “no evidence of the large nose horn common in centrosaurines, with a generally longer, lower snout.”