PALEONTOLOGY | They represent a new species of dinosaur with very extravagant horns.

Paleontologists presented in the magazine PirJ A a new species of dinosaur that appeared 78 million years ago, with a very extravagant set of horns.

dinosaur name, Locyceratops rangiformis, roughly translates to “Loki’s horned caribou-like face”, due to unusual curved blade-shaped horns on the back of the steering wheel (bony shield at the back of the skull) and asymmetrical horns at the top of the steering wheel, resemble caribou horns.

“Now the dinosaur has a permanent home in Denmark, so we chose a Norse god, and after all, doesn’t he look a lot like Loki with curved swords?” said University of Utah professor and study co-author Mark. Leven, referring to the trickster god’s favorite weapon.

Loewen, also a paleontologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History, and Joseph Sertich, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, are both scientific consultants Museum of Evolution in Denmarknew home of Locyceratops.

“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 kept forever for people to study and enjoy visiting.”

Locyceratops was discovered in 2019 in the badlands of northern Montana. two miles (3.2 km) south of the US-Canada border. Sertich and Lowen helped reconstruct the dinosaur from fragments the size of a dinner plate or smaller. When they put the pieces of the skull together, they realized that it was a new type of dinosaur.

Approximate length 6.7 meters and weight 5 tons.Locyceratops is the largest of a group of horned dinosaurs called centrosaurs that have been found in North America. It has the largest frilled horns ever seen on a horned dinosaur and lacks the nasal horn characteristic of its relatives.

“This new dinosaur pushes the boundaries of fancy ceratopsian headdresses, featuring the largest frilled horns ever seen on a ceratopsian,” Sertich said in a press release announcing the dinosaur’s discovery in the exhibit. Utah Museum of Natural History, where the replica is exhibited. “These cranial decorations are one of the keys to unlocking the diversity of horned dinosaurs and demonstrate that evolutionary selection for attractive displays contributed to the dizzying richness of Cretaceous ecosystems.”

Sertich compared the horns of dinosaurs to the feathers of birds. Birds use the color and pattern of their feathers to differentiate their species from other similar bird species.

“We think the horns of these dinosaurs were similar to what birds do with displays,” Sertich said. “They use them for mate selection or species recognition.”

Locyceratops was excavated from the same rock layer as four other dinosaur species, indicating that five different dinosaurs lived side by side 78 million years ago in the swamps and coastal plains along the eastern coast of Laramidia, North America’s western landmass created during excavations. the sea route divided the continent. Three of these species were closely related but had not been found outside the region.

“It’s an unheard of diversity to find five animals living together, similar to what you see today on the plains of East Africa 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. Loki’s discovery suggests that these species evolved quickly in a small area. a process sometimes observed in birds.

By the time Triceratops arrived on the scene 12 million years later, regional differences had narrowed to a single species, from Canada to Mexico, perhaps in response to a more homogeneous climate, Sertich said.

Study shows dinosaur diversity has been underestimated and presents the most comprehensive family tree of horned dinosaurs to date.

“Lociceratops helps us understand that we are only scratching the surface of the diversity and relationships within the family tree of horned dinosaurs,” Lowen said.