frill

The subject doesn’t require a lot of rhetorical frill to have its effect.

The huge plant-eater boasted a splendid frill on its head, topped with spikes and two large horns which curved downwards like blades.

The ceratopsids vary mostly in their frill patterns and not so much in feeding adaptations, he says: “Their jaws and teeth are more or less built the same way.”

And its frill was unlike any described so far: Not only did it sport two large, curved horns, it also boasted two spikes in the middle, one longer than the other.

The newest — described on Thursday by a team of researchers in the journal PeerJ — is Lokiceratops rangiformis, a five-ton herbivore with spectacular, curving brow horns and huge, bladed spikes on its meter-long frill.