Extraordinary finds sometimes occur without an exploration context in the countryside, desert, caves, or mountains. Paleontologists are usually attentive to collections that already group numerous fossils, sometimes forgotten by scientists, and in their reviews of these remains they find new points of view, expand information on some specimens or even rediscover new species until then. unknown. It was the case of this strange little dinosaur that lived 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa.
Scanning in a warehouse
Paul Sereno , a professor at the University of Chicago, was going through the Harvard University fossil collection for a study on heterodontosaurs. During the review he found the remains of a strange specimen that he could not identify. As soon as he inquired a little more about this little dinosaur, he discovered that it was not described and no one had paid attention to the fossil . It was a discovery from the 1960s as a result of an expedition in the Elliot Formation, a paleontological site in the Cape Province of the Republic of South Africa. The results of their rediscovery were published in the journal “ZooKeys”.
A rare bug
It was less than 60 centimeters long and weighed less than a cat. Pegomastax africana (originally named africanus , but corrected to female) was a dwarf dinosaur in the heterodontosaur family. Heterodontosaurids comprise an important early branch of small herbivores that developed over about 100 million years, between the late Triassic and early Cretaceous.
Its reconstruction shows us an animal that breaks with the usual image we have of dinosaurs . A short beak in the manner of a parrot, from which two pointed front fangs emerge, accompanied by rear teeth on both jaws that it used to crush plants. Its body was covered with quills like a porcupine, a characteristic that seems strange to us in dinosaurs but that is not unique evidence in this species. Precisely, another heterodontosaur, Tianyulong , would also have spikes. On the other hand, such highly developed tusks are striking in a species with a herbivorous diet . They are the element that most confuses researchers, who are not clear about the function of these canines. There are those who point to a possible defense weapon.
The remains are made up of a partial skull, the upper and lower jaws and pieces of the teeth, which has allowed us to describe this strange dinosaur, as well as to point out certain details about its diet and its way of chewing.
References:
Ayuso, M. 2012. They discover a new type of dinosaur, the Jurassic vampire porcupine. elconfidencial.com.
Sereno, P. 2012. Taxonomy, morphology, masticatory function and phylogeny of heterodontosaurid dinosaurs. ZooKeys 226, 1-225. DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.226.2840.
