New Dinosaur Species Identified and Named by CSU Graduate and Faculty Member

Lina Portman2 weeks ago

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A new species of dinosaur, sporting unusually ornate horns on its head and behind its neck, lived alongside at least four other species of rhino or elephant-like dinosaurs 78 million years ago in what is now today northern Montana, said researcher Joseph Sertich.

Sertich, an affiliated faculty member at Colorado State University, and Mark Loewen, a professor at the University of Utah, identified and named the new species “Lokiceratops rangiformis.” The identification and name were announced Thursday in the scientific journal PeerJ.

Lokiceratops belongs to the same family of horned dinosaurs as triceratops “but on the other side of the family tree; more of a cousin,” Sertich said in a telephone interview with the Coloradoan from a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, where the paleontologist works as a research associate.

Its discovery, through the grouping of bones found in 2019 by a team of commercial paleontologists, provides the world's first evidence of five different species of large rhino or elephant-like dinosaurs coexisting in the same place at the same time,” says Sertich. Bones of all five were discovered in the same rock layer in northern Montana and the southern part of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Sertich and Loewen reported in their study.

This area, they write, was a geographically restricted area of swamps and coastal plains along the eastern coast of Laramidia, the western landmass of North America created when a sea route divided the continent. Three of the species – Lokiceratops, Albertaceratops and Medusaceratops – were closely related but did not occur outside of this region.

“These animals are closely related, but they have different manifestations, similar to those seen in antelopes, for example in East Africa, where several related species are found but with different headgear ” said Sertich.

Sertich and Loewen helped reconstruct the dinosaur from bone fragments the size of a dinner plate or smaller, according to an article published Thursday in Source, an online publication of the CSU marketing and communications team. Once the skull was reconstructed, they realized they had discovered a new species of dinosaur.

The name Lokiceratops was chosen in homage to Denmark, where the reconstructed bones are on permanent display. Loewen suggested the dinosaur resembled the Norse god Loki, known for his horned helmet. Replicas made from bone casts are on display at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City, where Loewen is a resident research associate, and at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Estimates suggest that Lokiceratops, a herbivore, was 22 feet long and weighed around 11,000 pounds. It is the largest dinosaur in the group of horned dinosaurs called centrosaurines ever found in North America, and it has the largest and most ornate horns on its frill – the structure protruding from its neck between the head and the torso – never found on a horned dinosaur. . Unlike other dinosaur species in this family, Lokiceratops does not have a nasal horn.

Other unique features, Sertich said, are a symmetrical pair of spikes pointing in opposite directions, linked between “a pair of gigantic, flat, blade-like horns,” and horns above its eyes that ” fall to the side.

He compared the different structures and displays of the horns to the different colors and patterns of feathers found on different but similar bird species.

“We think the horns of these dinosaurs were analogous to what birds do with their exhibits,” he told Source. “They use them either for male selection or species recognition.”

Lokiceratops lived about 12 million years before the more common Triceratops, which he says developed as a more homogeneous species among the various species of horned dinosaurs found in North America.

Sertich said he was involved in the discovery of more than 20 different species of dinosaurs. A CSU paleontology course he took while digging in New Mexico in 2022 unearthed the intact skull of another horned dinosaur, a pentaceratops with five horns instead of the three found on a triceratops.

He began work on Lokiceratops while teaching at CSU, where he is an affiliated faculty member in the geosciences department in the Warner College of Natural Resources. He was curator of dinosaurs at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science for 11 years before taking his current position at the Smithsonian. He grew up in Colorado and earned a bachelor's degree in geology, biology and zoology from CSU in 2004.

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, select sports and other topics of interest to the Coloradoan. Contact him at [email protected], x.com/KellyLyell And facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.

Lina Portman

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