Researchers in South America Discover a New Species of Tiny but Tough Dinosaurs

14 August 2022
BySTEPHANIE PAPPAS, LIVE SCIENCE



An artist's illustration of two J. kaniukura. (Mauricio Álvarez and Gabriel Díaz Yanten)

Fossils of a small, prickly dinosaur recently discovered in South America may represent an entire lineage of armored dinosaurs previously unknown to science.

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 era of the dinosaurs, and lived between 97 million and 94 million years ago.

That means a whole lineage of armored dinosaurs lived in the Southern Hemisphere but had gone completely undetected until now, paleontologists reported in a new study.

J. kaniukura weighed about as much as a house cat and had a row of protective spines running from its neck to its tail and probably grew to about 5 feet (1.5 meters) long. It was a plant eater, with leaf-shaped teeth similar to those of Stegosaurus.

More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-in-south-america-discover-a-new-species-of-tiny-but-tough-dinosaurs