Meet ​“Mojo”

“Wait, this doesn’t look like a Chasmosaurus,” Nicholas Longrich thought two years ago, working in a researchers-only collection room in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Thus began a two-year quest to prove to the scientific world that he had discovered a new species of dinosaur.

That quest has ended with Longrich, who’s now based in New Haven, proved right — and with a newly named dinosaur: the Mojoceratops.

Longrich, at the time a paleontology doctoral student at the University of Calgary, was sifting through dinosaur fossils in 2008 to look for evidence of T. Rex bite marks when he came across a skull that didn’t seem quite right.

“I had a reasonable idea about which dinosaurs were out there, and this wasn’t one of them,” Longrich said, speaking in his lab at Yale, where he’s been a postdoctoral associate in the department of geology and geophysics since last fall.

In particular, the long frills jutting out of the roof of the skull didn’t look quite like those of a Chasmosaurus, which the skull was labeled as when the museum acquired it in the 1920s. (A better-known example of a dinosaur species with skull frills is the Triceratops, which is closely related to the Chasmosaurus.)

After confirming that the frills didn’t match those of any other known species, Longrich began to suspect that the museum’s label was wrong, and that the skull was of an as-yet-unknown species.

To convince himself and his fellow paleontologists that this was really something new, Longrich began scouring fossil collections in both the U.S. and Canada, looking for more examples of the distinctive heart-shaped frill structure.

He came up with about a half-dozen fossils that resembled feature of the skull in New York: long horns, a unique facial structure and an eye-catching set of heart-shaped frills.

Longrich’s final piece of evidence — the ​“linchpin,” as he put it — was another skull at the Museum of Natural HIstory. This one had been on public display for decades and, as Longrich proved, incorrectly labeled as a Chasmosaurus for all those years.

Other paleontologists at the museum had assumed that this skull, like the one that Longrich found in the basement, was simply a Chasmosaurus (a species that is well-known to paleontologists) with unusual facial features. Longrich took the time to look closer. He became convinced that these skulls represented something new.

This wasn’t the first time that Longrich enjoyed the thrill of discovery. Growing up on Kodiak Island in Alaska, Longrich essentially lived in a hands-on natural history museum.

“There were tide pools in our front yard, and mountains just a mile away,” he recalled.

He remembered running out to the tide pools as early as age four to collect sea animals at low tide. He found baby octopuses in the summer, and once he found ​“a cool crab with a back shaped like an Indian mask,” he said. He also recalled the time that his father, a fisherman, brought home a viper fish ​“with huge teeth and glow-in-the-dark lights on its body.”

“These were species that were ​‘new’ in terms of being things that I hadn’t seen yet,” Longrich said.

After majoring in evolutionary biology at Princeton, Longrich spent some time fishing and traveling in Alaska before enrolling as a paleontology doctoral student at the University of Calgary. It was during his last year at Calgary that he made his big discovery.

Of course, half the fun of discovering a new dinosaur species is getting to name it. Longrich was struck by his new specie’s particularly ostentatious frills, which were probably used to attract mates. So on one recent night when he was still writing up his findings, Longrich suggested to some his colleagues the name ​“Mojoceratops.” 

“I wasn’t being serious at all,” Longrich insisted. ​“I was just being a smart aleck.”

However, his colleagues encouraged him to stick with ​“mojo.” Longrich knew the term from its references in pop-culture, such as the Austin Powers movies. After some etymological research, he found that ​“mojo” originally referred to a magic charm used by people hoping to attract a date.

“Mojo” described the frills quite accurately, Longrich decided, so he went with the name in his official research paper, published by the Journal of Paleontology on July 8.

The Mojoceratops is getting considerable media attention. ​“People have gotten a kick out of the name,” Longrich explained.

But Longrich is already thinking about new projects. Later this month, he’ll be heading to Canada’s largely-unexplored Northwest Territories with two other Yale graduate students to dig for fossils.

Longrich explained that paleontologists these days are doing fewer fossil digs and more computer analysis of data collected by previous generations of scientists. Longrich still prefers to go look at fossils for himself.

If he didn’t, he never would have found his ​“Mojo.”