Matt Dempsey
If you thought that the T-Rex was the most formidable dinosaur, you might want to think again.
Thanks to researchers at the Natural History Museum, London, the University of Birmingham in the UK, and the Université Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah in Morocco, a whole new level of terrifying is on our radar, in the form on the Spicomellus afer, a kind of ankylosaur.
This dinosaur is historic for many reasons. Firstly, it’s the first ankylosaur to have been discovered on the African continent, wiht the discovery of its fossils found in Morocco. Moreover, it is actually the world’s oldest known ankylosaur too.
But more importantly, there was something quite unusual about this dinosaur, with the discovery of its fossils leaving researchers initially quite perturbed.
The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London
That’s because the Spicomellus wasn’t just any ankylosaur.
This dinosaur’s skeleton was so weirdly specialised that it had its own built-in armor and weaponry, via huge bony spikes that branched out everywhere from its tail to its neck, as Professor Susannah Maidment explained in a statement:
“Spicomellus had a diversity of plates and spikes extending from all over its body, including metre-long neck spikes, huge upwards-projecting spikes over the hips, and a whole range of long, blade-like spikes, pieces of armour made up of two long spikes, and plates down the shoulder. We’ve never seen anything like this in any animal before.”
Living around 165 million years ago, the ankylosaur has been visualised by the research team in all its bony glory, with the results published in the journal Nature.
Those magnificent but alarming spikes, the researchers suggest, could have been used for all kinds of purposes, from attracting mates to impressing or frightening potential rivals.
Matt Dempsey
Whatever their use, however, it’s possible that the Spicomellus’ spikes weren’t all too useful, since other, later ankylosaur species don’t seem to have evolved to keep this unusual adaptation. That is, apart from the tail, which researchers believe adapted into the club weaponry found on other ankylosaurs, millions of years later.
As Professor Richard Butler continued in the statement, discoveries like this one show just how much there is still left to learn about the world:
“Seeing and studying the Spicomellus fossils for the first time was spine-tingling. We just couldn’t believe how weird it was and how unlike any other dinosaur, or indeed any other animal we know of alive or extinct. It turns much of what we thought we knew about ankylosaurs and their evolution on its head and demonstrates just how much there still is to learn about dinosaurs.”
Meanwhile, Professor Driss Ouarhache highlighted just how important the discovery is to Moroccan science, with the fossils now being held and preserved by the Dhar El Mahraz Faculty of Sciences in Fez, Morocco:
“This study is helping to drive forward Moroccan science. We’ve never seen dinosaurs like this before, and there’s still a lot more this region has to offer.”
It just goes to show that no matter how much we think we know, nature always has some weird adaptation to prove us wrong.
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Categories: SCI/TECH
Tags: · africa, african dinosaur, ankylosaurs, anyklosaur, dinosaur bones, dinosaur fossils, dinosaurs, fossils, morocco, science, single topic, Spicomellus afer, top