Named after the Norse god Loki, meet Lokiceratops, a new horned dinosaur species

A brand new species of ceratops, or horned dinosaur, was recently discovered in northern Montana. This discovery was published in the journal PeerJ last week.

The dinosaur is called Lokiceratops rangiformis, after the Norse god Loki, and is believed to have lived roughly eighty million years ago. Researchers named it so for two reasons:

1. Like all ceratops, it has horns on his head — and in this case, they remind researchers of the blades on Loki's helmet.
2. The recovered skull currently resides in the Museum of Evolution in Denmark, one of the Scandinavian countries responsible for the story of Loki.

The second part of the name, rangiformis, refers to the horns not being symmetrical, like caribou.

The bones of the plant-eating dinosaur were found on private land in an area well known for its large amount of fossils. At first, researchers thought it was a known dinosaur, Medusaceratops lokii. "But once we started to puzzle this dinosaur back together, we quickly realized that we had something totally different on our hands," says Joseph Sertich, a paleontologist and co-author of the study.

Over the years, researchers have found five distinct species of ceratops in the area. The study authors say this points to how diverse and rapidly evolving the dinosaur populations were at the time. Furthermore, they think science is only beginning to scratch the surface of dinosaur diversity in the region.

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.

Today's episode was produced and fact-checked by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer.