But Maidment and her colleagues soon realised that the fossil belonged to something new-making it much more significant.
Initially museum staff thought the bone was part of the Moroccan stegosaur Adratiklit, since it came from the same area in the country’s Atlas Mountains. After passing through the hands of several Moroccan wholesalers, the rib bone reached Moussa Direct, a U.K.-based fossil dealer that sold the specimen to the museum.
museum through the legally complex commercial trade in Moroccan fossils. “What were they doing with their muscles when their ribs clearly had spikes above the skin?” “If you feel your own ribs, there’s muscles over the top of them that allow your arms to move,” says Susannah Maidment, the palaeontologist at London’s Natural History Museum who led the research on Spicomellus. It’s also a creature with no known analogue, living or dead. Spicomellus is the oldest known ankylosaur and the first found in Africa. The dinosaur’s name is Spicomellus afer, after the Latin for “spike,” “collar,” and “an inhabitant of Africa.” Based on the fossil’s shape and size, researchers strongly suspect it belonged to a type of armored dinosaur called an ankylosaur. The only known fossil belonging to this animal, unveiled in Nature Ecology and Evolution in September, is a single rib fragment with four spikes, measuring about 10.5 inches long. Morocco’s “punk-rock” dinosaur with bizarrely spiky ribsīetween 168 million and 164 million years ago, a strange reptile trundled through what is now northern Morocco: a creature with large spikes sticking out of its ribs and protruding from its skin. In no particular order, here are 10 of the most amazing dinosaurs unveiled by scientists this year. The combined results reveal just how diverse and strange these prehistoric animals really were. What’s more, technology is allowing scientists to make astounding discoveries about known dinosaurs-including details about their scaly skin, their digestive and reproductive tracts, their cellular structure, their social displays, and even how some nested in polar regions. Re-evaluations now show that Iguanodon is really multiple species, including a new one unveiled in November. Palaeontologists once gave the name Iguanodon to fossils that spanned tens of millions of years. Scientists also have a more refined sense of what a dinosaur “species” actually is. What has sustained this pace? For one, Holtz says, “it’s more people doing the work: more eyes on the ground, more teams, more parts of the world being investigated.” Dinosaur palaeontology is a more diverse and more global discipline than ever before-with huge benefits to science. So far this year, 42 new dinosaur species have been discovered, according to the University of Maryland’s Tom Holtz, who maintains a database of new dinosaur finds. The pace of discovery is staggering, and during this golden age of palaeontology, scientists are transforming our understanding of the prehistoric world. On average, palaeontologists have found more than 45 new dinosaur species every year since 2003.