‘Bristling with spikes’: oldest known ankylosaur fossil found in Morocco | Dinosaurs
Tank -shaped physics, bristling with body sliding and a collar of points The length of golf clubs, SPICOMELLUS AFER looks more like a creation of Pokémon than a living creature. This bizarre dinosaur has traveled the floodplaces of what is now in North Africa 165 million years ago, paleontologists revealed.
The fossil, the oldest known ankylosaur specimen, was determined near the central Moroccan city of Boulemane. Its extravagant armor confused existing theories of the way in which ankylosaurs, a large group of dinosaurs eaten plants, have evolved.
“He is absolutely bristling with tips on his entire body,” said Professor Richard Butler, the University of Birmingham and the co-directed project. “He has these incredibly distinctive tips around his neck – a armored collar which is absolutely huge and completely out of proportion with the rest of the body, smaller points coming out of the ribs, and at the end of its tail, it would have had a kind of weapon.”
The anatomy of the dinosaur was so bizarre that gathering the body plan of the incomplete clutter of the fossilized bones was not an easy task.
“We put all the armor on a table and tried to understand where, most logically, it would be suitable,” said Butler.
Ankylosaurs extend in the middle of the Jurassic at the late era of Cretaceous, when an asteroid landing has destroyed the majority of species, and are characterized by a squat, slow and slow and strongly armored physics.
“They are probably a little stupid because they have relatively small brains, but they succeed a lot,” said Butler. “They are there for about 100 million years.”
SPICOMELLUS AFERNow the first known example of the group, would have been about 4 m long and weighed approximately two tonnes. The fossil lacks the end of the tail, but the merged vertebrae suggest that it would have resulted in a club -shaped structure, probably used as a weapon to unleash rivals or predators. This suggests that adaptations of tail weapons have evolved approximately 30 meters earlier than before.
The more modest body vest of subsequent ankylosaurs is generally interpreted as having evolved as a physical defense. The pure extravagance of Spicomellus‘s The peaks, which would have exceeded difficult skin, suggest more dominance or mating, concluded the researchers.
“When you see the neck of this thing, it seems to be a total exaggeration,” said Butler. “It seems to be the kind of thing that would have complicated his life.”
A source of frustration is that the career where Spicomellus was searched was targeted by fossil hunters. Research was based on approximately half of the skeleton, which takes place at the Faculty of Sciences of Dhar El Mahraz in Fez, but the fossilized bones which belong to the same specimen were marketed online for up to £ 10,000, said Butler.
“There is a huge problem with fossil poaching in Morocco,” he said. “Pieces of this specimen have been for sale on the market in Europe and North America. There is probably a significant amount [of the specimen] This continued on the market, often bought by rich individuals. It is a fairly sad aspect of this story. »»
