“Spiky dragon”: new dinosaur species with special spines discovered in China

The approximately 245 centimeter long fossil skeleton, measured from snout to tail tip, is exceptionally well preserved after 125 million years. It is from a young specimen of the new iguanodon-like species ‘come on, please‘. It belongs to the same large family as the Iguanodons that were found in Bernissart, Hainaut, at the end of the 19th century.

Of come on, please had large, overlapping scales along its tail and a body covered in spines of various shapes and sizes. This is a very remarkable finding, because these spines have never been observed in dinosaurs before. The species has already been given the nickname ‘spiky dragon’ by the scientist.

Advanced image analyzes and histological examination also show that the spines were keratinized and exceptionally well preserved down to the level of the skin cell nuclei. “It is exceptional to find skin on a dinosaur that has been preserved down to the cellular level,” says Pascal Godefroit, paleontologist at the Institute of Natural Sciences and one of the authors of the paper. “It gives us insight into the biology of these animals at a level we never thought possible.”

The spines were probably used to deter predators. The come on, please was therefore harder to swallow for smaller carnivorous dinosaurs that lived in the same ecosystem. In addition, the spines may also have played a role in regulating body temperature or sensing touch.

“This discovery shows that even well-studied groups, such as iguanodont dinosaurs, can still surprise us,” concluded Huang Jiandong, the paper’s first author. “The skin of dinosaurs turns out to be much more complex than we thought.”

Bron: Belga, Nature Ecology & Evolution