Newly Unearthed Dinosaur Evolved "Large Tail Weapon" Unlike Any Other
upstart writes:
Newly unearthed dinosaur evolved 'large tail weapon' unlike any other:
In a southern and sparsely populated region of Chile, scientists excavated the skeletal remains of a naturally armored dinosaur that lived over 70 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period. Much to the team's surprise, they found it possessed a rather bizarre feature: a knife-like artillery in place of a tail.
[...] "It was an animal with a proportionally large head and a narrow snout with a beak," Sergio Soto Acuna, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the University of Chile said. "However, the most notable feature is the caudal weapon: the posterior half of the tail is enclosed in a structure made up of fused bony plates that give the tail a very strange appearance."
The team dubbed the 2-meter (about 6-foot-6-inch) long species Stegouros elengassen due to the rest of its body resembling the Stegosaurus genus -- aka Spike from The Land Before Time. Later, extensive DNA analysis and cranial examination revealed the animal to be more closely related to a dinosaur group called Ankylosaurs, but the team decided to keep the initial name.
[...] Presumably, the dangerous appendage was used to defend against predators. But either way, Acuna adds, "This shows us that the fossil record of the Gondwanan continents can still have unexpected surprises for us."
Also at Reuters (with pictured).
Journal Reference:
Sergio Soto-Acuna, Alexander O. Vargas, Jonatan Kaluza, et al. Bizarre tail weaponry in a transitional ankylosaur from subantarctic Chile, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04147-1)
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