Anybody wandering 78 million years in the past by way of the swamplands of recent day Montana could have come throughout a dinosaur so uncommon that scientists have likened it to the god of mischief himself.At greater than 20 toes lengthy and weighing 5 tons, this hulking herbivore had a pair of two footlong blade-shaped horns on its majestic, frill-shaped head. It additionally had two extra 16-inch horns above its eyes, and maybe greater than a dozen others dotted round its face like some type of spiky crown.Lokiceratops rangiformis — named after the Norse god Loki, popularized not too long ago within the Marvel Cinematic Universe — is a wholly new dinosaur beforehand undiscovered by paleontologists, scientists mentioned in a journal Thursday. Not everybody agrees. Some friends have questioned whether or not it’s only a variation on one other sort of ceratopsidae, the household of dinosaurs that features the long-lasting triceratops.These behind the research, revealed within the journal PeerJ, beg to vary.“Whereas some paleontologists could argue that Lokiceratops is a variant of one other dinosaur it lived alongside … the variety of frill horns is dramatically completely different,” Joseph Sertich, an affiliate professor at Colorado State College and co-author of the research, wrote on Instagram. It’s “not simply the dimensions and form.”Lokiceratops, a newly-identified Cretaceous interval horned dinosaur.Sergey Krasovskiy / through ReutersThe lokiceratops had at the least 12 smaller horns coming from its head, and even perhaps 14, whereas one other related trying dinosaur, the medusaceratops, solely had 10, he mentioned. Moreover, he added, there is no such thing as a proof it had a nostril horn typical of lots of its brethren.This late-Cretaceous beast was discovered within the badlands of Montana, part of the western United States with one of many highest concentrations of dinosaur fossils on Earth.Business fossil hunter Mark Eatman discovered the bones in spring 2019 on a Montana ranch within the Kennedy Coulee area, just some miles from the Canadian border. Denmark’s Museum of Evolution purchased the skeleton in 2021, transporting it to the Utah-based fossil preparation and mounting firm Fossilogic. There, consultants used polyester resin to sculpt lacking items from the cranium and physique, whereas surrounding the entire thing with silicone-rubber molds so replicas may very well be solid.It was mounted in 2022 and brought to the museum in Denmark the place it’s on show. NBC Information has contacted the museum for remark.”That is the one identified specimen on the planet,” the museum’s web site says. “This unbelievable horned dinosaur stands out for its huge, blade-like frill horns … Lokiceratops was a large! “Many consultants seem satisfied.”It seems to be genuinely a brand new genus and a brand new species,” Michael Benton, a professor of vertebrate paleontology on the College of Bristol, in England, instructed NBC Information. “I discover the brand new paper very thorough and clear and so they make a convincing case for complicated ecological relations on the time,” he mentioned in an e-mail.This dinosaur and its “shut kin all lived side-by-side,” Benton added, saying that researchers usually noticed the identical phenomenon in different species: “small-scale evolutionary explosions of 5 or 6 carefully associated species all residing and feeding shut collectively.”Others are extra skeptical, nevertheless.“It’s an interesting-looking animal,” Jordan Mallon, a paleontologist on the Canadian Museum of Nature, instructed Science Journal. “I believe it’s going to be somewhat contentious as as to whether it represents a brand new species or not.”Alexander Smith is a senior reporter for NBC Information Digital primarily based in London.