An international team of paleontologists has discovered, among the fossils in the collection of the State Museum of Natural History in Karlsruhe, in Germany, a new species of dinosaur that has never been seen before. Ubirajara jubatus, as the creature has been baptized, is a small dinosaur that has strange 15-centimeter long spines that protrude from its shoulders, which scientists speculate were simply used as ornaments like a peacock’s tail and a large mane of hair on the back.
His body looks quite familiar to us at first glance . It’s a chicken-sized dinosaur from the compsognathid family (and one that you probably remember from the Jurassic Park movies because they look so much alike).
Had gone unnoticed
This predator had a mane of fluffy filaments and a pair of rigid ribbon-like streamers emerging from both shoulders and is the first feathered dinosaur to be discovered in the Southern Hemisphere.
His name Ubirajara jubatus , means “lord of the spear” and comes from the local indigenous language Tupi, while jubatus comes from the Latin that represents mane or crested.
Ubirajara jubatus lived 110 million years ago in what is now Brazil and probably used its unusual shoulder feathers and lush mane to attract potential mates – and ward off rivals – by displaying its flamboyant appearance, the authors explain. in the journal Cretaceous Research that collects the study.
Experts believe that the dinosaur could bristle its mane at will when feeling threatened and leave it flat, close to the body, in moments of rest, to move with agility around the undergrowth of the forest, which would have allowed it to optimize its body to increase the speed and to release or capture heat. The mane was 11 centimeters ; undoubtedly the longest mane ever recorded on any dinosaur.
Regarding the quills, rods or ‘spears’ they were made of keratin , the same protein that our nails and hair and the feathers and beaks of birds contain. Their position on the shoulders means that they could probably also be raised and lowered at will.
“These shoulder structures are really elaborate; they made this animal look quite spectacular, just as a bird of paradise looks fabulous today, “says David Martill, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth in England and a co-author of the study. “When birds have these kinds of feathers, they do all kinds of fancy dances and displays, so this dinosaur looks like a little boast of the same thing too.”
Until now, researchers believed that many dinosaurs on the supercontinent of Gondwana, which covered much of the southern half of the planet during the Cretaceous Period, had feathers, but until now we had not had direct evidence, according to Martill after discovering the torso of an unknown species of dinosaur while taking high-resolution X-ray images of limestone slabs from northeastern Brazil.
Paleontologists suspect that the specimen is a young male , given the size of the dinosaur’s backbone, but cannot confirm this because the fossil is partial.
Referencia:R.S.H. Smyth et al. A maned theropod dinosaur from Gondwana with elaborate integumentary structures. Cretaceous Research. Published online December 13, 2020. doi: 10.1016/j.cretres.2020.104686.
