New Fanged Dwarf Dinosaur Found—"Would Be Nice Pet" [1]
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 [2] 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 [3].)
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 [4], a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence [5]. (National Geographic News is a division of the Society.)
To watch the video and read the rest of this story, visit NationalGeographic.com. [6]
Category:
- 3D News [7]