Dinosaur ‘Punk Rock’ with Metre-Longs Discovered tips

Scientists discovered a bizarre armored dinosaur that had long tips that came out of his neck.

The species, called SPICOMELLUS AFERlived 165 million years ago and is the oldest example of a group of armored dinosaurs called ankylosaurs.

The elaboration and pair of the animal found in Morocco have been a shock for experts, who must now rethink how these armored dinosaurs have evolved.

Professor Richard Butler, of the University of Birmingham who co-directed research, told BBC News that it was the “punk rocker” of his time.

Punk Rock is a style of subculture and music that emerged for the first time in the 1970s. His subscribers often have thorny hair and accessories.

“It is one of the strangest dinosaurs ever discovered,” said Professor Butler.

The co-leader of Professor Butler’s project, Professor Susannah Maidment of the Natural History Museum, added that it was surprising that the points were fused directly on the bone.

“We do not see this in any other animal, living or off,” she said.

“It is absolutely covered with truly strange points and projections all over the animal’s back, including a bone collar that wraps around its neck and a kind of weapon at the end of its tail, therefore a dinosaur of the most unusual,” she said.

The discovery is so unusual that the two teachers examine if the discovery could force a rethink of theories on the way in which ankylosaurs have evolved.

These animals survived late in time that dinosaurs were on earth, in a period known as Cretaceous. It was between 145 and 66 million years old.

The end of this period saw the emergence of large carnivorous predators, such as T Rex, he had therefore thought that the ankylosaurs started with simple small armored plates on the back, which then became larger and larger to protect themselves from these large animals, according to Professor Butler.

“If you had asked me what I expected that the oldest known ankylosaurus looks like, I would have said something with a fairly simple armor,” he told BBC News.

“Instead, we have an animal bristling with spikes like a hedgehog, the bizarre that we have ever found in any animal, far from the range of armor seen in subsequent ankylosaurs.”

The researchers do not have enough skeleton to be sure of the proportions of the animal, but they believe that it would have been about four meters long and a meter high, weighing about two tonnes.

The discovery raises the possibility that the ankylosaurs began with an armor developed in a period of previous dinosaur, known as Jurassic, which has evolved over tens of millions of years to become simpler and perhaps more functional, according to Professor Maidment.

“What we speculate is that these structures may have been used for display, and it is only later in Cretaceous, when we start to see gigantic dinosaurs with huge jaws and overwhelming bites, that they then needed to coopte these display structures as a body armor.”

The discovery was made by a local farmer in what is now the Moroccan city of Boulemane. It was the first ankylosaur to be found on the African continent. Professor Butler remembers when he saw the fossils for the first time.

“It was a moment of jaw and friction of the spine, perhaps the most exciting of my career. It was clear immediately that this animal was much stranger than we imagined and that we had enough to give meaning,” he said.

Professor Driss Ouarhache, who managed the Moroccan team involved in research, of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, said: “This study helps to advance Moroccan science. We have never seen dinosaurs like that before, and there is even more than this region has to offer.”

Research was published in the journal Nature.

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