Rabat – Scientists found an “unusual” fossil of over 163 million old dinosaur in Morocco’s Boulahfa in the Middle Atlas mountains.
Scientists consider the latest discovery as unique among fossil discoveries.
The fossil belongs to an ankylosaurus, a type of herbivore species of dinosaurs. They are mostly known for their “bony armour that once covered their backs,” according to the Natural History Museum.
Fossilized spikes are present on the specimen.
Paleontology at the Natural History Museum, Susannah Maidment, drew immediate attention to the specimen, stating that it is “totally unlike any extant or extinct vertebrate that we are aware of.”
The dinosaur expert observed that scientist has never encountered “this phenomenon of an osteoderm fusing to a rib in any other vertebrate, living or dead.”
She said that it is difficult to “come up with analogues, really, because there aren’t any.”
Dr. Maidment described the dinosaurs as small and having short limbs.
“They had transverse rows of armour, meaning that the armour extends from the midline of their body out to the sides,” she said.
Experts initially believed it to belong to a stegosaur when they saw the fossil.
“But we just don’t see stegosaurus with this sort of armour,” she said.
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After making thin sections of the fossil, the sectioning reveals that the bone structure of the spikes has “a signature that we only see in ankylosaurs from this period,” she added.
According to the Natural History Museum, the new discovery is significant and historical because it represents the first time this kind of fossil has been found in Africa.
Morocco has been the site of several recent discoveries that made headlines, both locally and internationally.
Earlier this year in February, a team of scientists discovered a 2.5 million-year-old macaque fossil in Guefair, Morocco.
In the same month, scientists discovered a crushed ossified lung of a 66-million years old coelacanth, a giant type of fish species present during the era of dinosaurs, in Oued Zem, in Morocco’s Beni Mellal-Khenifra region.
