A newly discovered dinosaur, described by scientists as the “punk rocker” of its time due to its bizarre, meter-long neck spikes, is forcing paleontologists to radically rethink the evolution of armored dinosaurs. The species, named Spicomellus afer, was discovered in Morocco and lived 165 million years ago, making it the oldest-known ankylosaur in existence. But its elaborate, spiky bone-armor has completely upended theories about the ankylosaur’s evolution. “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 armor,” said co-leader of the research, Professor Richard Butler from the University of Birmingham. “Instead, we have an animal bristling with spikes like a hedgehog, the most bizarre armor that we’ve ever found in any animal, far outside the range of armor seen in later ankylosaurs.” It is now thought that rather than evolving elaborate spikes to protect against predators, the early armor may have been for display, only later evolving for more functional defense. “It is one of the strangest dinosaurs ever discovered,” Prof. Butler added, and said discovering 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.”
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