About 110 million years ago on the edge of an ancient lagoon in what is now northeastern Brazil, a two-legged, chicken-sized dinosaur from the Cretaceous period made a living by hunting insects and perhaps small vertebrates such as frogs and lizards.
Inside, it was normal, with a skeleton similar to many small dinosaurs from the earlier Jurassic period, scientists said Tuesday. On the outside, it was all but.
This dinosaur, called Ubirajara jubatus, had a mane of hair-like structures, while also had two totally unique, rigid, ribbon-like features, probably made of keratin, the same substance that makes up hair and nails, protruding from his shoulders. .
“There are many other strange dinosaurs, but this one doesn’t look like any of them,” said David Martill, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Portsmouth in England, who helped lead the study, published in the journal Cretaceous Research.
Ubirajara hair-like structures appear to be a rudimentary form of feathers called protoplomas. It wasn’t real hair, a feature exclusively of mammals. Many dinosaurs had feathers. In fact, birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs about 150 million years ago.
“Probably from a distance he looked hairy instead of leady,” Martill said. “He probably had hair-like proto-feathers on much of his body, but they are only preserved along his neck, back and arms. The ones on the back are very long and give it a kind of mane unique to dinosaurs. “
Ribbon-like structures in Ubirajara may have been used to show off, possibly to attract comrades or intimidate opponents or in rivalries between men, Martill added. These displays often make them male animals (think of the elaborate feathers of a peacock’s tail), which leads Martill to make a “polite assumption” that this Ubirajara individual was male.
“The ribbons that seem to come from the shoulders are like nothing I’ve seen in nature before,” Martill said.
Although it is impossible to know from the fossil – which arrived at a museum in the state of Ceará in the early 1990s, ScienceNews reported – Martill said Ubirajara could have been colored.
“I bet it was,” he added.
Guardianship staff contributed to this report