An artist’s impression of Ubirajara jubatus, a new species of dinosaur found to sport strange spikes most likely used for mating displays
Paleontologists have discovered a new species of dinosaur that’s a real show-off. Ubirajara jubatus is a small creature found with strange spikes sticking out of its shoulders, which scientists speculate were used as ornaments like a peacock’s tail.
At a glance, Ubirajara’s body shape looks pretty familiar. It’s a chicken-sized dinosaur in the compsognathid family – you might remember some of its relatives as those little blighters running underfoot and occasionally swarming people in the Jurassic Park/World movies.
Rather than the green scaly skin of its Hollywood counterparts, Ubirajara had a long, thick mane running down its back, and furry filaments covering its arms. The researchers believe that the animal could make its mane stand on end at will, the way a dog can raise its hackles when it feels threatened. In calmer times, it could lay the mane flat against its skin, to keep it out of the way while darting around the underbrush.
But the mane isn’t its most fascinating feature – that honor belongs to the weird structures poking out of its sides. They were long, flat, stiff ribbons with a small ridge down the middle. They’re not quite feathers, but they were made of keratin, the substance that makes up bird’s feathers and beaks and our own hair. Their positioning on the shoulders means they could probably also be raised and lowered as needed.
And most importantly, the team says that nothing like them has ever been found in the fossil record before.
Dating back about 110 million years, Ubirajara is one of the oldest examples of this kind of ornamentation in dinosaurs. The insight was gleaned thanks to the immaculate fossil, which managed to preserve not only bone, but soft tissue like skin and these keratin structures.
https://newatlas.com/biology/dinosaur-ubirajara-jubatus-ornamentation/
