They discover a new species of dinosaur that was an armored creature similar to Tyrannosaurus rex

100 million years ago a species of dinosaur called Jakapil kaniukura inhabited South America. Its discoverers assure that it was a huge armored biped capable of resisting any attack.

Several generations today love dinosaurs for the mere fact of having seen Jurassic Park (or Jurassic World if you are very young). These films managed to hook millions of children to the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods and their impressive inhabitants.

Well, today we have exciting news for those who love this world of science and archaeology, as a new dinosaur has been discovered in Patagonia and its appearance promises to be from a movie. Let’s hope Elon Musk doesn’t try to replicate it at his house.

Armored dinosaurs like stegosaurus and ankylosaurus were mostly large, bulky animals that walked on four legs, but paleontologists have now discovered a strange, dog-sized relative that moved on two legs.

One of the largest and most striking groups of dinosaurs were the thyreophorans, herbivores that sported thick plates and armor to protect themselves from predators.. The most famous members of this group would be the stegosaurus family, the ankylosaurs.

But while this group used to be giants and almost exclusively quadrupedals, paleontologists have now found one that bucks the trend.

the new speciescalled Jakapil kaniukura, it had similar bony plates on its back, neck and tail, but was only 1.5 m tall and weighed between 4 and 7 kg.

And what is even stranger, it ran on two legs and had small arms in the shape of chicken wings. Yes, like the Tyrannosaurus rex.

“This dinosaur’s neck armor is unique and protected that delicate area from predator attacks,” explains Sebastián Apesteguía, author of the study. “The surviving bones of the arms show us that they were tiny, which is unusual.”

Despite his possibly fearsome appearance, Jakapil was still a herbivore. Its teeth were found to be leaf-shaped with a large face for grinding plant matter, in a similar arrangement to its relatives. It also had a single, relatively short jaw with a large ridge below.

But perhaps strangest of all is where Jakapil fits into the family tree. It seems to be something of a missing link from the earliest thyreophoran dinosaurs to the various later stegosaurus and ankylosaur groups, which became quadrupedal as they became armored and much heavier.

The only other bipedal member of the family is Scutellosaurus, which lived in the early Jurassic, about 196 million years ago, in what is now the United States.

But the Jakapil lived in Patagonia some 100 million years later. The team say this makes it a member of an ancient basal lineage of thyreophorans that survived well into the Cretaceous.long after relatives like stegosaurus evolved and died out.

And the fact that it is the first of its kind to be found in South America shows that this group was more widespread than previously thought. Life always finds its way, as Dr. Ian Malcolm used to say.