Meet Lokiceratops, the rock star cousin of Triceratops | CNN


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About 67 million years ago, two dinosaurs faced off in what is now Montana before being buried together in a single tomb.

It is unknown which dinosaur won the battle. Triceratops horridus and Tyrannosaurus rex both died with battle scars.

The Triceratops fossil first emerged during the erosion of Hell Creek Formation rock in 2006. The T. rex fossil was later spotted riding it.

When commercial paleontologist Mark Eatman found the tangled fossils, the discovery was like something from the “Jurassic Park” movies come to life.

The “Dueling Dinosaurs” were on display in April at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

And now Eatman has struck dinosaur gold again.

Sergei Krasovskiy/Museum of Evolution

An artist’s illustration shows what Lokiceratops might have looked like 78 million years ago, living in the swamps of what is now northern Montana.

This specimen could be the rock star of dinosaurs.

After being on display for more than a year at the Museum of Evolution in Maribo, Denmark, the fossil of a horned dinosaur is finally recognized as a previously unknown species.

Named in part for the Norse god of mischief, Lokiceratops rangiformis was a cousin of Triceratops and lived in a swampy environment alongside other species of horned dinosaurs around 78 million years ago.

Lokiceratops had a flashy, fierce look befitting a metalhead that helped it defend its territory and seduce its mates: an ornate skull with a shield-shaped frill, horns over its eyes, and paddle-shaped horns in the back.

When NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams took off on a test flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule on June 5, they were expected to return from a visit to the International Space Station about eight days later.

Now, the duo is likely to return sometime in July, according to the space agency.

The return date keeps changing as Boeing and NASA work to understand the various problems that arose during the spacecraft’s first crewed voyage, such as helium leaks and thruster failures.

Since the capsule’s service module, which experienced these problems, will not return, engineers are working to understand as much as possible before Starliner departs.

Mr. Kornmesser/ESO

An artist’s illustration shows a supermassive black hole as it awakens at the center of a distant galaxy. The black hole attracts a growing disk of material as it feeds on the surrounding gas, causing the galaxy to brighten.

Astronomers observe for the first time the awakening of a supermassive black hole in the middle of a distant galaxy.

The 2019 detection of an unusually bright glow by a telescope initially alerted scientists that something unusual was happening in the galaxy, located 300 million light-years away.

Now the international team has an unprecedented view as the sleeping giant comes to life and consumes all the cosmic matter it can.

Meanwhile, researchers may have discovered a primordial type of black hole by reexamining a popular theory by the late British physicist Stephen Hawking in search of elusive direct evidence of the universe’s missing matter.

A 246 million-year-old fossil discovered in an unexpected place reveals just how globe-trotting some ancient creatures were.

The late palaeontologist Robert Erwan Fordyce, an emeritus professor at the University of Otago, first spotted the fossil, which belonged to a nothosaur, in New Zealand. This discovery constitutes a rare case of discovery of a marine reptile in the southern hemisphere.

The astonishing discovery led researchers to wonder how the reptiles moved from one side of the Earth, dominated at the time by a supercontinent called Pangea, to the other.

It’s likely that nothosaurs, which paddled through water with their limbs, swam all around Pangea using the global ocean as a coastal highway, said Benjamin Kear, a paleontologist at the University’s Museum of Evolution. from Uppsala in Sweden.

Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images

Huge stone statues, known as moai in the indigenous Rapa Nui language, stand out on a hillside of the Rano Raraku volcano on Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile in 2005 .

Mapping the rock remains could help researchers piece together what exactly happened to the Polynesian sailors who originally inhabited Easter Island.

Researchers are divided into two camps as they study the remote Pacific island, also known as Rapa Nui, dotted with hundreds of monumental stone heads called moai.

Some experts suspect that limited resources have led to a catastrophic population decline. Others believe the isolated group lived a sustainable life until 18th-century European settlers brought disease to the island.

New research using satellite imagery and machine learning suggests that the island had a much smaller and more stable population, and that the islanders were able to live on sweet potatoes and other crops grown using a ancient agricultural technique.

Dive into these discoveries:

— As Voyager 1 explores uncharted cosmic territory, the probe returns valuable scientific data for the first time since a computer glitch sidelined the spacecraft seven months ago.

— Scientists have discovered microplastics in human penises, adding to the growing list of potential health problems linked to these tiny particles.

— A 3,300-year-old ship filled with hundreds of intact jars discovered at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea is one of the oldest shipwrecks ever discovered.

— Meet Colombian marine biologist Fernando Trujillo, who ventured to the Amazon decades ago with a mission: to save mysterious pink river dolphins.

— For years, astronomers believed that Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was first observed on the planet more than 350 years ago. A new analysis reveals that the observations made in 1665 belonged to something else.

Do you like what you read? Oh, but there’s more. register here to get the next edition of Wonder Theory delivered to your inbox, brought to you by the editors of CNN Space and Science Ashley Strickland And Katie Hunt. They marvel at the planets beyond our solar system and the discoveries of the ancient world.



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