Author: Cassie Martin / Source: Science News
A newly identified dinosaur’s evolutionary origins are written all over its face.
Bony knobs studding the head and snout of Akainacephalus johnsoni, a type of armored dinosaur called an ankylosaurid, are similar to those of Asian ankylosaurids.
That was a surprise, says Jelle Wiersma, a paleontologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. He and Randall Irmis, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City, had expected the 76-million-year-old skeleton, unearthed in 2008 in Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, to have a smoother dome…The post A new ankylosaur found in Utah had a surprisingly bumpy head appeared first on FeedBox.