It was found with its front end flat on its belly and the back end angled down to a lower level, almost as if caught in quicksand, Vargas said.įrom bird-like snout to tail tip, stegouros stretched about six feet (two meters) but would only come up to the thighs of humans, Vargas said. The fossil is from about 72 million to 75 million years ago and appears to be an adult based on the way bones are fused, Vargas said. (Though the stegouros name stuck and can be easily confused with the more well-known stegosaurus.) Instead, it was a rare southern hemisphere member of the tank-like ankylosaur family of dinosaurs.
The back end, including its tail weapon, seemed similar to a stegosaurus, so the researchers named it stegouros elengassen.Īfter Vargas and his team examined the pieces of skull and did five different DNA analyses, they concluded it was only distantly related to the stegosaurus. The plant-eating critter had a combination of traits from different species that initially sent paleontologists down the wrong path. “Books on prehistoric animals for kids need to update and put this weird tail in there.
“It’s a really unusual weapon,” said Vargas, a University of Chile paleontologist.
The new species, described in a study in the journal Nature, has something never seen before on any animal: seven pairs of “blades” laid out sideways like a slicing weapon used by ancient Aztec warriors, said lead author Alex Vargas. Some dinosaurs had spiked tails they could use as stabbing weapons and others had tails with clubs.
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