The newly discovered species, Jakapil kaniukura, looks like a primitive relative of armored dinosaurs like Ankylosaurus or Stegosaurus, but it came from the Cretaceous, the last age of dinosaurs, and lived between 97 and 94 million years ago. That means an entire lineage of armored dinosaurs lived in the Southern Hemisphere but was undetected until now, paleontologists said in a new study. J. kaniukura weighed about as much as a house cat and had a series of protective spines running from its neck to its tail and probably reached 5 feet (1.5 meters) in length. It was herbivorous, with leaf-shaped teeth similar to those of Stegosaurus. Paleontologists at the Félix de Azara Natural History Foundation in Argentina discovered a partial skeleton of an adult J. kaniukura in the Río Negro province of northern Patagonia. The dinosaur probably walked upright and had a short beak capable of delivering a powerful bite. It likely would have been able to eat tough, woody vegetation, the researchers reported Thursday (Aug. 11) in the journal Scientific Reports. (Riguetti, FJ et al., Scientific Reports, 2022) The new dinosaur joins Stegosaurus, Ankylosaurus and other armor-backed dinosaurs in a group called Thyreophora. Most thyreophora are known from the Northern Hemisphere, and fossils from the earliest members of this group are found mainly in Jurassic rocks from North America and Europe from about 201 million years ago to 163 million years ago. The discovery of J. kaniukura “shows that early thyreophores had a much wider geographic distribution than previously thought,” wrote Natural History Foundation paleontologists Felix de Azara, Facundo J. Riguetti and Sebastian Apesteguía. It was also surprising that this ancient lineage of doorkeepers survived into the Late Cretaceous period in South America, they added. In the Northern Hemisphere, these older gatekeeper types appear to have been extinct since the Middle Jurassic. In the southern supercontinent Gondwana, however, they apparently survived well into the Cretaceous. (Later thyrophorans survived longer. Ankylosaurus, for example, became extinct along with the rest of the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago.) The name “Jakapil” comes from a word meaning “white-haired” in the Puelchean or northern Tehuelchean indigenous language of Argentina. “Kanikura” comes from the indigenous Mapudungun language. You can see what J. kaniukura might have looked like when it was alive, thanks to this computer simulation by Gabriel Díaz Yantén, a Chilean paleoartist and paleontology student at the National University of Rio Negro. • Jakapil kaniukura • here is the first thyreophoran from Argentine Patagonia Such honorable work with Sebastian Apesteguia, Facundo Riguetti and Mauricio Álvarez to achieve this reconstruction. #blender #blendercommunity #paleoart #paleontology #Jakapil #Zphh. — PaleoGDY (@PaleoGDY) August 11, 2022 Related Content: The crocodile-faced dinosaur may have been Europe’s largest predator 10 Surprising Dinosaur Discoveries What color were dinosaurs? This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.
