Lokiceratops rangiformis lived about 78 million years ago, researchers said.
A new, giant-horned species of dinosaur was discovered that researchers said is the "largest and most ornate" of its kind ever found, according to a study published Thursday in the journal PeerJ.
Researchers said Lokiceratops was a plant-eating dinosaur that lived in the swamps and flood plains of present-day Montana about 78 million years ago and is a cousin of the infamous Triceratops. The distinctive horns inspired Lokiceratops' name. The first half pays homage to the Norse God Loki and means "Loki's horned face" while rangiformis means "looks like a caribou" in reference to how the horns of the dinosaur resemble those of a caribou.
"We laid them all out on a table and started to fit them back together," he said. "Turns out, they did fit together with a click, so they were just broken in the field before they were buried. What's interesting is, as we pieced together the skull, it became very clear that this was a new dinosaur. We were seeing a dinosaur that no one in the world knew about for 78 million years.
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