The Earliest Armoured Ankylosaur: Spicomellus afer
- 演化之聲
- Mar 14
- 5 min read
During the Middle Jurassic, an unusual armoured dinosaur roamed the floodplains of what is now Morocco in North Africa. This dinosaur, Spicomellus afer, possessed an extraordinary body covered with elaborate armour. Its discovery represents the earliest known fossil record of ankylosaurs and pushes the evolutionary history of this group back by at least thirty million years. The find has dramatically reshaped palaeontologists' understanding of how ankylosaur body armour and tail weapons evolved, and it also encourages a reconsideration of the function of the complex structures seen on these dinosaurs.
Ankylosaurs are a well-known group of ornithischian dinosaurs. They were quadrupedal herbivores with broad bodies and relatively short limbs, typically protected by thick bony plates and spines embedded in the skin. One of the most famous representatives is Ankylosaurus magniventris, a Late Cretaceous dinosaur from North America that carried a massive tail club. Members of this group were covered in extensive dermal armour, with osteoderms and spikes spread across the back and limbs. However, fossils documenting the early stages of ankylosaur evolution are extremely scarce. For the Early and Middle Jurassic, the fossil record has long been fragmentary and poorly understood. Only a few scattered remains were previously known, such as isolated teeth and osteoderms from the Oxford Clay Formation in England and teeth from the Bathonian White Limestone Formation, suggesting that ankylosaurs might already have existed at that time.
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