Armoured dinosaur’s ‘loopy’ spikes weren’t only for defence

A dinosaur fossil present in Morocco will be the most bizarrely and elaborately armoured vertebrate that has ever walked the planet.

The first fossil of Spicomellus afer was found in Morocco and reported in 2021. It was solely a rib fragment with fused spikes, suggesting that it belonged to a bunch of dinosaurs referred to as ankylosaurs. These short-limbed, wide-bodied herbivorous dinosaurs are characterised by their overlaying of plates and spines.

Then, in October 2022, a farmer within the badlands of Morocco’s Middle Atlas mountains started to excavate a way more full Spicomellus skeleton. That fossil has now been dated to 165 million years in the past, within the Jurassic Period. The creature was in all probability about 4 metres lengthy and weighed as much as 2 tonnes.

Armoured dinosaurs corresponding to stegosaurs and ankylosaurs, like fashionable crocodiles, had bony plates that sat within the pores and skin referred to as osteoderms. But within the Spicomellus fossil, there are two various kinds of bony armour: osteoderms and spikes which might be really fused to the bone.

“It’s unheard of among armoured dinosaurs, and indeed anything that has osteoderms, which is totally crazy,” says Susannah Maidment on the Natural History Museum in London, a member of the staff that analysed the fossil.

In whole, the Spicomellus specimen has dozens of armoured spikes overlaying nearly its whole physique. Some spikes connected to a neck collar are practically a metre in size. There are additionally fused vertebrae within the tail, indicating that it might have been a fierce weapon.

The creature was so weird, says Maidment, that she “ran out of hyperboles to describe it”. “You can’t use words like ‘crazy’ in a scientific paper, and I kept using words like extreme and elaborate,” she says. “Then one of my colleagues suggested another way of trying to get across the unusualness of this thing was to describe it in the study as ‘baroque’.”

Such excessive armour would have severely restricted the species’ capability to navigate its setting and would have made residing anyplace with dense vegetation nearly inconceivable, says Maidment. “It would have just kept getting stuck everywhere,” she says.

The armour is so complicated that the researchers suppose it had one other operate along with defence, corresponding to to draw mates. “Things that appear to be totally impractical in the fossil record almost invariably relates to sex in some way or other. And so, you know, we think it is most likely to be some sort of display.”

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