National Geographic - Christine Dell'Amore, 10/3/12
Odd, spiky dinosaur likely used self-sharpening teeth for self-defense.
Artificial skin and quills flesh out a cast of a skull from Pegomastax africanus ("thick jaw from Africa").
Photograph courtesy Erin Fitzgerald; art by Tyler Keillor
A new, tiny dinosaur with vampire-like fangs devoured ... plants? So says a new study of Pegomastax africanus, a 2-foot-long (0.6-meter-long) heterodontosaur that lived about 200 million years ago. (Test your dinosaur IQ.)
P. africanus small, fanged dinosaur species that were "scampering around between the toes of other dinosaurs at the dawn of the dinosaur era," said study author Paul Sereno, a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence. (National Geographic News is a division of the Society.)
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