New dinosaur species on display in Denmark

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An ancestor of Triceratops, Lokiceratops was a horned, herbivorous dinosaur that lived 78 million years ago in what is now North America. The dinosaur skull was discovered in northern Montana, near the US border with Canada, in 2019.

It is now on display at the Southern Danish Evolution Museum.

“We know that this is a new dinosaur, that it’s a horned dinosaur. And as such, it’s extremely important because new dinosaurs are always important,” explains Christoffer Knuth, director of the museum.

Experts estimate that Lokiceratops was over 20 feet long and weighed about 5 tons. Mark Loewen, a paleontologist at the University of Utah, named the new species Lokiceratops rangiformis due to its unusual, curved, blade-like horns – a nod to the Norse god Loki’s helmet. But also because of the asymmetrical horns at the top of its skull which are reminiscent of caribou antlers.

Experts say Loki was mined from the same rock layer as several other dinosaur species, suggesting that many different dinosaurs lived side by side 78 million years ago.

“We actually know that diversity in northern Montana, in the United States, was very, very high in the late Cretaceous.”explains Loewen. “We’re starting to learn more about the relationships within the ceratopsian family from this specimen.” “We now know that… similar dinosaurs could live together, without competing, so that’s pretty new.”adds the museum director.

Paleontologists have reconstructed Loki’s skull from countless fragments. After piecing everything together, they realized that Loki was a new species of dinosaur. The discovery was published in the scientific journal Peerj on Thursday June 20. “It was a huge job putting the little pieces together.”says Christoffer Knuth.

“It was kind of scattered, like you had a Chinese vase, a new vase, and you dropped it, and it was all over the floor.”

Lokiceratops is now on display at the Evolution Museum, located within the grounds of Knuthenborg Safari Park in southern Denmark. The museum unveiled its latest addition on Thursday: a massive 13-metre-long skeleton of Camarasaurus, a long-necked dinosaur similar to Diplodocus.

Discovered on a Wyoming cattle ranch in 2017, it lived during the Jurassic period, between 155 and 145 million years ago. “He was found in exactly the same position in which he died,” explains Knuth. “And most likely it died in a swampy area or a slow-moving stream or river. It sank to the bottom, got covered in sediment, mud, and so no one ate it. And then 150 million years later, we found it.”

But the dinosaur’s journey to Denmark wasn’t without its problems: unexpected delays due to customs complications in Zurich, Switzerland, delayed its arrival. The museum’s director said that at one point, no one knew exactly where its six boxes containing the precious fossils were. “The last 72 hours have been quite stressful,” he said. “We knew it wasn’t lost as such, but we didn’t know where it was. And that’s pretty stressful when you’re dealing with a gigantic dinosaur.”

Knuthenborg Safari Park is home to around 500 wild animals. Combined with the living animals outside, the museum tells an evolutionary story over 300 million years.