In the heart of the Middle Atlas Mountains in central Morocco, a global team of palaeontologists and geologists has discovered new remains of a very unusual dinosaur. It belonged to the group called ankylosaurs, plant eaters whose bodies were covered in bony plates.
The fossils reveal a heavily armoured dinosaur. It has distinctive outward-pointing spikes along its body. These fossils are now considered to represent the oldest known ankylosaur remains in the world – it lived about 165 million years ago. As geoscientists who were part of the team that discovered and examined them, we had the unique opportunity to study these remarkable specimens firsthand.
This species, named Spicomellus afer, literally meaning a spiky armoured dinosaur from Africa, was first described in 2021 from a single rib discovered at the same site in Morocco. At the time, the discovery was extraordinary because of the rarity of ankylosaur fossils from the Middle Jurassic, around 165 million years ago.
