Meet ‘Loki,’ the new dinosaur with giant horns that dates back 78 million years The new species is the largest horned dinosaur ever discovered. It measured 6.7 meters and weighed around five tons What do you get when you combine a controversial comic book character with a 78-million-year-old ancestor of Triceratops ? Lokiceratops rangiformi .
This newly discovered dinosaur has a very distinctive feature: a unique array of head ornaments, including the largest horns ever seen. The species name, announced June 20 in the scientific journal PeerJ , translates to “Loki’s horned face that looks like a caribou.” The dinosaur was discovered, identified and named by Joseph Sertich from Colorado State University and Mark Loewen from the University of Utah.
The two authors named the new species after the unusual, blade-like antlers on its frill — the shield of bone at the back of the skull — and the asymmetrical reindeer-like horns at the peak of the frill. These head ornaments also resembled the helmet that belonged to Loki, the charismatic trickster from Marvel comic books and movies, who was inspired by a Norse god of the same name. The fossil remains were found in 2019 on private property near the Canadian border in the U.
S. state of Montana. The researchers reconstructed the dinosaur using fragments the size of dinner plates or even smaller.
Once they had pieced the skull together, they realized that it was a new species. Reconstructing and identifying the remains was.