Meet Lokiceratops, A Giant Dinosaur With Blade-Like Horns

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow, live from the Eccles Theater in Salt Lake City, Utah.

[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]

The Intermountain West is a dinosaur nerd’s dream because it’s such a hot spot for fossils. And some of the most famous dinosaur fossils in the world like T-Rex, triceratops can be found in western North America. So of course, we couldn’t come out to Utah without digging into some info about dino science.

And today, we’re going to meet a fossil that was just unveiled last year, a spectacular horned dinosaur named Lokiceratops Let’s welcome to the people who worked on Loki. They’re right here with us.

[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]

Savhanna Carpenter, paleontologist, school outreach coordinator at the Natural History Museum of Utah, and Dr. Mark Loewen, vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah. Welcome to Science Friday. Nice to have you.

[CHEERING, APPLASUE]

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: Thank you.

MARK LOEWEN: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

IRA FLATOW: Mark. All right, let me begin with you. Take me back to the beginning. Where did Lokiceratops come from?

MARK LOEWEN: So Lokiceratops came from the Badlands in a river valley just about six miles South of the Canadian-United States border in Montana. It was dug up by commercial collectors on a private ranch, and it was sold to a museum in Denmark. And we have a partnership with that museum in Denmark, the Museum of Evolution. And so scientists from there, and from the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah got to look at this dinosaur for the first time and figure out just what it might be.

IRA FLATOW: And Savhanna, at what point did you start to think, aha, we’ve got something new here?

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: Yeah, there’s a few other ceratopsians that were from the same area that Lokiceratops was discovered in. But when we started to lay out all the bones and figure out which is what and figure out how they all fit together like a big old puzzle, it sort of started to become clear this is not any of the other things. One of these things is not like the other. And we realized this is actually something totally unique and brand new to science.

IRA FLATOW: Well, would you all like to see it? Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Yeah!

IRA FLATOW: Well, let’s have the of Lokiceratops right here.

[CROWD MURMURING]

Wow, wow. I mean, i wasn’t– Mark, it wasn’ expecting– it’s lime green. I mean, it’s like a flavor.

MARK LOEWEN: Well, it’s pretty exciting. If you look at this dinosaur, it’s got all kinds of projections going off of its head. This is not an animal that wants to hide. This is an animal that wants to stand out and say, I’m sexy.

[LAUGHTER]

IRA FLATOW: Well, it’s certainly doing that tonight.

[LAUGHTER]

And it has so many horns on it, right. And Savhanna, it looks like– what, a triceratops has one central horn, but I’m counting 1, 2, 3, 4, maybe 5 horns on this?

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: Yes, yeah. It is the most ornate horned dinosaur ever found.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. And OK, the name Loki– Mark, where does that come from.

MARK LOEWEN: So again, the museum that first acquired this specimen is from Denmark. So often, when we think about a name for a dinosaur, we’re thinking about, will we use some God from mythology and things like that?

So we settled on the Norse god Loki. He’s the trickster. He’s got wide blades. And so that kind of reminded us of some of these ornaments on the top of the frill. At the same time, you’ll notice there’s a little horn on one side and a bigger horn on the other side. That actually reminded us of reindeer.

So this animal is actually called Lokiceratops rangiformis, which literally translates to Loki’s horned face that looks like a caribou–

[LAUGHTER]

–or a reindeer.

IRA FLATOW: Makes sense to me. Yeah. That’s good. And this dinosaur, the fossil, had to be put together, right? Like, many fossils, they don’t come whole. They come in a bunch of pieces. How difficult was that to do?

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: Yeah, it was definitely a big job. We kind of had a big jumble of bones. And our job was to figure out what bone was what, and then also put it together– kind of like a puzzle, like I mentioned earlier. So we sort of laid them all out on a table, figured out which pieces go with the skull, which pieces go below the skull, and just created it from there one bone at a time.

MARK LOEWEN: Savhanna and I are working on at least five new relatives of this dinosaur from right here in Utah. So there’s lots of work to be done. We’re just scratching the surface. We really don’t know anything about dinosaurs.

And that’s an honest fact. We’ve found less than 0.01% of the dinosaurs that ever lived, for sure. So when I say we don’t nothing, we really know nothing about the world of the dinosaurs. We’re just trying to reconstruct it.

I remember being around a table with all the pieces of this dinosaur, and we actually thought that it was a different dinosaur it was actually sold to the Museum of Evolution as a dinosaur called medusaceratops, which comes from a mile and a half away at the same level. So we were sure that it was going to be that.

But when we started to put it together and we saw a completely different pattern of the frill. Savhanna and I just looked at each other, and we were like, this is new. And this is new means we get to name it, which is pretty cool.

[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]

IRA FLATOW: You guys really get into your work, don’t you?

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: It’s easy. We have the most fun job, I think. So it’s not hard to be excited about dinosaurs when you’re a dinosaur nerd. [CHUCKLES]

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, and it’s a good place to be a dinosaur nerd, right?

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: That’s right.

IRA FLATOW: And where did he live? What was the environment. It was living in, Mark? Tell me about what it was like there.

MARK LOEWEN: So this animal lived at the edge of a giant seaway that cut North America in half. So it’s actually living in the swamps of the seaway that would have been kind of like Louisiana. We know that there was vegetation in the water, lots of low deciduous trees, and it’s about 100 miles away from the mountains, which are pretty much in the same place as they are in Glacier National Park.

So this animal is living out on the floodplain. It’s living alongside duck billed dinosaurs. There’s a giant cousin of Tyrannosaurus that’s trying to eat it. We find little fish. We find crocodiles. We find all kinds of things in the ecosystem. So we’re interested not just in what does the dinosaur look like, but what are the other things that live alongside the dinosaurs?

IRA FLATOW: Let’s go to a question from the audience over here.

AUDIENCE: What would be the main color scheme on these dinosaurs?

MARK LOEWEN: So one of the things about this dinosaur is we recognize that it has all these projections off the top of its frill. We think that these are actually very closely related to some of the structures that we see in birds, like a cassowary. So we actually patterned the coloration of this animal off of birds being very bright.

Another thing about it is we actually find the skin of a very closely related animal right here in Utah called nasutoceratops. Nasutoceratops has the skin pattern that you’ll actually see on this mount, and it’s very much like the shoulder of a chameleon. So in some ways, we picked the leopard chameleon as a model for the colors that we would see.

Keep in mind, this animal is larger than an elephant, living in an ecosystem where it’s not trying to hide. Its size, protects it from the predators that it lives with. So we tried to go with the colors that we see in birds, especially on the ornaments on the top of the skull.

IRA FLATOW: Savhanna, can you look at the fossil? Are there any details that clues you into what Loki’s life was like?

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: Ooh, yeah. So one of my favorite features that this fossil has is something called a pathology. It actually has a little bit of a hole on the side of its squamosal part of its frill, where it had an injury. We do see pathologies and plenty of dinosaurs, things like T-Rex that has broken bones from ankylosaur clubs and triceratops with little holes from where it maybe fought other triceratops, or was bit by a t-Rex or something.

So I really like looking at pathologies. I think it’s kind of cool to see that, this animal has lived a long and hard life. Perhaps it’s injured, and he’s walking through the swamp and doing his best. Maybe he got in a fight. Maybe he walked into a branch like I am often to do. So that’s kind of– it makes him a little bit more personable, This, dinosaur, I think.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, he’s personable looking.

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: Savhanna, there’s this huge issue in paleontology, a struggle between public places and the private collector. That’s been going on forever. How does Loki fit into this?

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: Yeah. So like we mentioned earlier, Lokiceratops was found on private land, and that happens all the time here in the United States. The laws do say if you find something on private land, that is yours. And that is often a death sentence for a dinosaur. It’s not going to be studied, not going to go to a museum.

We kind of lucked out that the Museum of Evolution in Denmark sort of swooped in and rescued this dinosaur. It’s actually there, on display now and still accessible for researchers. And we were allowed to do science on it. So even though it was found on private land and sold privately, this really is like a fairy tale ending for that type of sale. This dinosaur, it turned out perfectly for Lokiceratops.

IRA FLATOW: Does Loki, Mark, teach you anything about dinosaur evolution?

MARK LOEWEN: Again, since we thought it was that other dinosaur, when we actually start looking at it, there’s four different dinosaurs that are very similar, all living at the same place in an area smaller than downtown Salt Lake City. So when I was taught paleontology back 20 years ago, we could never have that many dinosaurs in the same place at the same time if they’re closely related.

It turns out we didn’t know anything about that. These things are like birds. If you took all of these skeletons of birds of paradise today and took all their feathers off, a paleontologist would have a hard time telling them apart. But of course, there’s over 15 different species and lots of different variations. We’re looking at dinosaurs way more like birds now. We’re starting to understand that these animals are evolving like birds.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s go to a question from the audience over here.

AUDIENCE: I’m Arwen. And my question is, since you said they’re in a very small location, is that because they only lived there? Or is it because that’s an ideal habitat to preserve the fossils?

IRA FLATOW: These kids ought to be sitting up here, I think, asking these questions. Wow, great question.

[APPLAUSE]

MARK LOEWEN: It’s actually a miracle of the way that the ice sheets melted and cut a little area around the Milk River in Montana and Alberta. And so there’s a small area where all of the sediments have been carved down. And in those carve-down sediments– we call them coulees– there are fossils. And so this is just a little area in which the ice melt rivers wash down and wash this out. And so we have it preserved.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. And one other thing I learned since coming here to Utah is that you discovered this as an undergraduate. This is your first dino find her first dino find.

[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]

How exciting is that?

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: It’s so exciting. Yeah, that’s one of my favorite parts of this story is that I got to do this as an undergraduate learning to do paleontology. I love talking about that with potential students and current students because I think a lot of people don’t realize, as an undergrad, you can absolutely still contribute to Science. And so I’m really excited to have been able to do that as part of my time at University of Utah.

[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]

[CHUCKLES] Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: Mark, you have a little more experience. This is what, your 13th, 14th?

MARK LOEWEN: Yeah, 15th, maybe something like that.

IRA FLATOW: But it never gets old, right?

MARK LOEWEN: Never gets old, never gets old. And we have more than 15 that we’re working on. There’s lots of dinosaurs that we still have to tell you about. And we’re as excited about them as you are.

IRA FLATOW: We did a show about dinosaurs a few months ago. And actually, one of the kids in the audience asked the paleontologists the best question– how do you know if it’s a rock or if it’s a fossil? And she said, I lick it.

[LAUGHTER]

Is that a technique you guys use at all?

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: The lick test.

IRA FLATOW: Yes, the lick test.

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: My first summer digging up dinosaurs, I didn’t have an eye for what was fossil yet. And so I definitely hiked around just sort of licking things.

IRA FLATOW: What does it taste like? How do you know the difference?

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: Yeah. So bone is porous, kind of spongy. And that means when you lick it, it’ll actually stick to your tongue in a way that a rock just won’t. So it is a good last ditch test.

MARK LOEWEN: But they do taste like dirt.

IRA FLATOW: Do not lick things you find, though.

[LAUGHTER]

IRA FLATOW: Go ahead. There’s a question here.

JOANNA: Hi, I’m Joanna. And I’m just wondering if you use DNA testing at all on these? Or if they’re just too old and you can’t?

MARK LOEWEN: , I’m going to take this just because I taught this in class on Thursday, and a couple of my students are in the audience, so they’ll enjoy this.

IRA FLATOW: Is she a plant in the audience? Is that what it is?

MARK LOEWEN: No.

IRA FLATOW: No, no.

MARK LOEWEN: DNA has a half-life of 521 years. So the oldest DNA that we can get is about 6.8 million, and that’s about the limit, maybe a little bit farther. We’re never going to get the DNA of dinosaurs out of the bones.

But there is DNA from dinosaurs all over the world belonging to the 18,000 species of birds that are still alive that are dinosaurs. So people who have been talking about bringing back the dinosaurs have been doing things like trying to get those genes to express, to get the dinosaur features that you think of with a dinosaur to express in bird DNA, things like teeth, elongated bony tails, things that.

And did you know we have never cloned a bird or an insect? The only thing that we can clone today are mammals, and not all of them. So we’re a long ways from cloning dinosaurs because dinosaurs are like birds. We can’t clone birds. We can’t clone reptiles. I’m not going to say we never could, but we have the problem of where are you going to get the DNA? And then how are you going to do it?

IRA FLATOW: Is Loki your favorite? Do you each have favorite dinosaurs? Is Loki your favorite?

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: I mean, for me, it’s the only dinosaur I have helped name, so it’s a no-brainer for me. A little more complicated when you’ve named 15 plus.

MARK LOEWEN: So my favorite dinosaur by far has got to be Microraptor. It’s got wings on its arms. It’s got wings on its legs, and it’s iridescent pink, green, purple. So yeah, I’ve got to go with a chicken-sized X wing Velociraptor.

[LAUGHTER]

IRA FLATOW: Well, I don’t think we can top that as a final question. Really cool.

[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]

Thank you very much for both of you. This has been so much fun. Savhanna Carpenter, paleontologist and school outreach coordinator at the Natural History Museum of Utah, and Dr. Mark Lowen, vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah. Thank you both.

SAVHANNA CARPENTER: Thank you, Ira

MARK LOEWEN: Thank you.

[CHEERING, APPLAUSE]

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