‘Punk rock’ dinosaur with metre-long spikes found

Scientists have found a weird armoured dinosaur which had metre-long spikes protruding from its neck.

The species, known as Spicomellus afer, lived 165 million years in the past, and is the oldest instance of a bunch of armoured dinosaurs known as ankylosaurs.

The elaborateness and spikiness of the animal present in Morocco has come as a shock to specialists, who now must rethink how these armoured dinosaurs developed.

Prof Richard Butler, from the University of Birmingham who co-led the analysis, informed BBC News that it was the “punk rocker” of its time.

Punk rock is a sub-culture and music model that first emerged within the Seventies. Its followers usually have spiky hair and equipment.

“It is one of the strangest dinosaurs ever discovered,” stated Prof Butler.

Prof Butler’s mission co-leader, Prof Susannah Maidment of the Natural History Museum, added that it was stunning that the spikes have been fused immediately on to the bone.

“We don’t see that in any other animal, living or extinct,” she stated.

“It’s absolutely covered in really weird spikes and protrusions all over the back of the animal, including a bony collar that wraps around its neck and some sort of weapon on the end of its tail, so a most unusual dinosaur,” she stated.

The discovery is so uncommon that the 2 professors are contemplating whether or not the invention may power a rethink of theories on how ankylosaurs developed.

These animals survived late into the time dinosaurs have been on Earth, in a interval often called the Cretaceous. This was between 145 to 66 million years in the past.

The finish of this era noticed the emergence of enormous carnivorous predators, similar to T Rex, so it had been thought that ankylosaurs began off with easy small armoured plates on their again, which then grew to become bigger and extra in depth to guard themselves from these massive beasts, in response to Prof Butler.

“If you had asked me what I would have expected the oldest known ankylosaur to look like I would have said something with quite simple armour,” he informed BBC News.

“Instead, we have an animal bristling with spikes like a hedgehog, the most bizarre armour that we’ve ever found in any animal, far outside the range of armour seen in later ankylosaurs.”

The researchers do not have sufficient of the skeleton to make sure of the animal’s proportions, however they estimate it will have been about 4 metres lengthy and one metre excessive, weighing round two tonnes.

The discovery raises the chance that ankylosaurs began off with elaborate armour in an earlier dinosaur interval, often called the Jurassic, which developed over tens of hundreds of thousands of years to develop into extra easy and presumably extra useful, in response to Prof Maidment.

“What we are speculating is that maybe these structures actually were used for display, and it was only later in the Cretaceous, when we start to see gigantic dinosaurs with huge jaws and crushing bites, that they actually then needed to co-opt these display structures as body armour.”

The discovery was made by an area farmer in what’s now the Moroccan city of Boulemane. It was the primary ankylosaur to be discovered on the African continent. Prof Butler remembers the second when he first noticed the fossils.

“it was a jaw dropping, spine-tingling moment, perhaps the most exciting in my career. It was clear right away that this animal was much weirder than we imagined and that we had enough of it to make sense of it,” he stated.

Prof Driss Ouarhache, who led the Moroccan workforce concerned within the analysis, from the Université Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, stated: “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.”

The analysis has been published in the journal Nature.

Watch the story of the dig with the Natural History Museum