In 2024, a Montana fossil revealed Lokiceratops, one of the strangest horned dinosaurs ever described

If you thought Triceratops had awesome headgear, wait until you hear about his older, weirder cousin. In 2024, scientists discovered a new species of dinosaur in the badlands of northern Montana, not far from the Canadian border. They named it Lokiceratops rangiformis. And the the skull had a combination of features rarely seen together.

It is one of the largest and most ornate horned dinosaurs of its time, with two large blade-like horns on the back of its frill. But the really strange thing is the asymmetry. On each side of its frill are its irregular frill ornamentation inspired the species name. The name Lokiceratops means "Loki's horned face", after the shape-shifting Norse god, and the name rangiformis is a reference to the irregular antlers of caribou and reindeer.

Oh, and it didn't have a nose horn. Not damaged. Just missing.

Numbers behind the beast
It wasn't a little animal. Lokiceratops is estimated to have been about 22 feet long and weighed more than 11,000 pounds, about the same as an African bush elephant. It lived 78 million years ago, some 12 million years before its more famous cousin, Triceratops.

The fossils were first found in 2019, but the painstaking work of piecing together the skull, from dozens of fragments, took years. The frill horns are the largest ever discovered on any dinosaur.

But the bizarre combination of features in the skull, the absence of a nasal horn, and the enormous, asymmetrical frill horns was not an anomaly of one particular animal, according to the peer-reviewed study published in PeerJ. That was enough to create a new genus and species. That's a big deal in paleontology.

The bigger story: Dinos lived in local pockets
This is where it gets really interesting, and where this discovery goes beyond a cool-looking skull.

Lokiceratops lived on an ancient landmass called Laramidia. During the Late Cretaceous, a shallow sea split North America in two, with the western half, Laramidia, becoming an island continent from Mexico to Alaska. Scientists have long suspected the dinosaurs here didn’t roam freely across the entire landmass. Instead, they evolved in isolated regional populations, with different species evolving in the north and south.

The PeerJ paper confirms this pattern with striking detail. The authors found that five different ceratopsid species, including Lokiceratops, lived in the same small area of northern Laramidia at about the same time. That level of variety, crammed into a tight geography, suggests rapid local evolution, not wide-ranging, slow-changing populations.

This idea was already brewing in the scientific literature. A landmark PLOS ONE study by Sampson et al. provided strong support for the dinosaur provincialism hypothesis with two new co-occurring ceratopsids from Utah, documenting distinct chasmosaurine taxa in the north and south of Laramidia, the first documented occurrence of intracontinental endemism within dinosaurs.

And Lokiceratops is right there with it, another piece of evidence that the American West wasn’t one big dinosaur world, but a patchwork of local ecosystems, each producing its own unique species.

Why it matters beyond the fossil
For paleontologists, the discovery is quietly thrilling. The American West is among the most studied fossil regions on the planet. But in 2024, an all-new genus of giant horned dinosaur appeared in Montana. One that had been in the rock for 78 million years.

The study authors suggest that the sheer number of similar taxa recognised from this region means that dinosaur diversity may have been underestimated.

In other words, there is almost certainly more to be discovered. Montana, Wyoming and Utah badlands still offer up surprises. Lokiceratops is a reminder that the prehistoric past of North America is not yet written, and that the future fieldwork may reveal more surprises.