Lokiceratops

A colored digital ink illustration of Lokiceratops, an extinct horned ceratopsian dinosaur, depicted walking towards the viewer with its body half in deep shadow. It's a bulky quadrupedal dinosaur with a large beak and a neck frill, somewhat resembling its distant relative Triceratops, but while it has similar long brow horns the rest of its head ornamentation is different. It has no nose horn, and its frill is rather squarish in shape, with two large curving blade-like spikes at the top that aren't symmetrical. It's body is colored mottled brown and it head is colored orange-red with yellow blotchy markings.

Lokiceratops rangiformis was a ceratopsian dinosaur that lived during the Late Cretaceous (~78 million years ago) in what is now Montana, USA. Estimated at about 6.7m long (~22ft), it was one of the largest known members of the centrosaurine branch of the ceratopsians.

It had a unique arrangement of ornamentation on its skull, with no nose horn, two long brow horns, and a pair of huge asymmetrical curving blade-like spikes on the top of its square frill – some of the largest known frill spikes of any ceratopsian.

It lived in a swampy environment near the shore of the Western Interior Seaway, in an area that seems to have had an unusually high diversity of ceratopsians – along with Lokiceratops there were three other centrosaurines (Medusaceratops, Albertaceratops, and Wendiceratops), and one chasmosaurine (Judiceratops).

(There’s also a possibility that it might not actually be a unique species. We know some other ceratopsians’ faces changed quite drastically as they aged, so Lokiceratops could instead represent a fully mature individual of Medusaceratops.)

References:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *