You are in the forested plains of North America, 78 million years ago.

The air in the Montana swamp was thick, humid, and smelled of rotting cycads. You were positioned safely behind the root-mass of a massive conifer, watching a herd of Lokiceratops navigate the muddy shoreline. These were not the common Triceratops of later eras; they were more bizarre, more intense.

A large male, probably weighing close to five tons, stepped into the clearing. His frill was a chaotic masterpiece, adorned with massive, asymmetric blade-like spikes that looked like the mismatched antlers of a caribou, shimmering with faded shades of what might have been deep red or blue in the sunlight. He lacked a nose horn, making his face look blunt, almost rhino-like, but the twin blade-horns on his frill made him look like a mythic trickster god.

Behind him, a smaller female was tending to two smaller calves, their heads already showing the beginnings of those signature curved blades. The family wasn’t eating, but interacting. The male waved his massive head back and forth, the sunlight catching the serrated edges of his frill, clearly a display of dominance or a challenge to a rival unseen in the thick vegetation.