Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Soto-Acuña, Sergio
• Vargas, Alexander O
• Kaluza, Jonatan
• Leppe, Marcelo A
• Botelho, Joao F
• Palma-Liberona, José
• Simon-Gutstein, Carolina
• Fernández, Roy A
• Ortiz, Héctor
• Milla, Verónica
• Aravena, Bárbara
• Manríquez, Leslie M E
• Alarcón-Muñoz, Jhonatan
• Pino, Juan Pablo
• Trevisan, Cristine
• Mansilla, Héctor
• Hinojosa, Luis Felipe
• Muñoz-Walther, Vicente
• Rubilar-Rogers, David

Titel

Bizarre tail weaponry in a transitional ankylosaur from subantarctic Chile

Ist Teil von

• Nature (London), 2021-12, Vol.600 (7888), p.259-263

Ort / Verlag

England: Nature Publishing Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Armoured dinosaurs are well known for their evolution of specialized tail weapons-paired tail spikes in stegosaurs and heavy tail clubs in advanced ankylosaurs . Armoured dinosaurs from southern Gondwana are rare and enigmatic, but probably include the earliest branches of Ankylosauria . Here we describe a mostly complete, semi-articulated skeleton of a small (approximately 2 m) armoured dinosaur from the late Cretaceous period of Magallanes in southernmost Chile, a region that is biogeographically related to West Antarctica . Stegouros elengassen gen. et sp. nov. evolved a large tail weapon unlike any dinosaur: a flat, frond-like structure formed by seven pairs of laterally projecting osteoderms encasing the distal half of the tail. Stegouros shows ankylosaurian cranial characters, but a largely ancestral postcranial skeleton, with some stegosaur-like characters. Phylogenetic analyses placed Stegouros in Ankylosauria; specifically, it is related to Kunbarrasaurus from Australia and Antarctopelta from Antarctica , forming a clade of Gondwanan ankylosaurs that split earliest from all other ankylosaurs. The large osteoderms and specialized tail vertebrae in Antarctopelta suggest that it had a tail weapon similar to Stegouros. We propose a new clade, the Parankylosauria, to include the first ancestor of Stegouros-but not Ankylosaurus-and all descendants of that ancestor.