Paleontologist have unearthed the remains of what they are calling a new species of dinosaur, which they believe lived 200 million years ago. The Pegomastax africanus allegedly had a parrot head and porcupine quills, not to mention its fangs.
Odd in Appearance
Nature does pretty and nature does ugly. And sometimes it does really, really ugly. Never was that truer than 200 million years ago when the Pegomastax africanus was walking — or scurrying — the Earth. The critter was a whole new kind of homely, but judging by a paper just published simultaneously in the online journal Zookeys and on the National Geographic Society website, it was a whole new kind of cool too. The little cat-sized beast is a vivid example of how evolution can sometimes assemble the most unlikely body types out of what amounts to off-the-shelf parts — and make them work improbably well together.
Not Exactly a New Discovery, just remained unnamed
Before the new paper was released, the Pegomastax species had never been named or even fully described, but that doesn’t mean that the
discovery of its remains is remotely new. The first specimen of the animal was found in a rock outcropping in Africa in the 1960s. It was dug out and shipped to the U.S., where it spend the better part of the past five decades in the paleontology collection at Harvard University. The fossil seemed like nothing special — the remains of just one more small, scurrying herbivore that inhabited a world in which the thundering allosaurs and Tyrranosaurs were the true stars. It wasn’t until last year that Paul Sereno, a professor of paleontology at the University of Chicago and National Geographic explorer in residence at Harvard, got a look at the fossil, and realized he had something unusual in his hands.
Omnivore
The animal had a head like a vulture and a beak like a parrot, with tall, sharp teeth near the back of its mouth. The beak was apparently designed for plucking fruit and the teeth for slicing and tearing leaves and other plant matter. Wear patterns on both the top and bottom teeth indicate that they scraped against each other as the jaw opened and closed, which may or may not have been pleasant for the Pegomastax —whose name, appropriately, means “thick jaw” — but it did keep the teeth freshly sharpened at all times. This kind of jaw design is not uncommon for small herbivorous dinosaurs, but the Pegomastax had one feature that set it apart from most of the others: a pair of stabbing canine teeth in front of the slicing teeth — standard equipment for a meat-eater sure, but definitely not for a birdlike plant-eater.
