About 125 million years ago, a dinosaur armed with spikes walked around what was once the Mediterranean climate of the British Isles of Wight. Along with the ankylosaur, a new type of armored dinosaur has now been described from the island on the southern coast of Great Britain. Vectipelta Bareti They date to the early Cretaceous period and are distinguished from other ankylosaurs in the region by differences in cervical and dorsal vertebrae, pelvic structure and more blade-shaped spines, The research team reports in the “Journal of Systematic Paleontology”. The remains were already excavated in the 1990s.
The small island is one of the best places in Europe to find the remains of these primitive animals. Much has already been discovered here: From giant herbivorous sauropods and massive predatory dinosaurs to tiny deer-like herbivores and tiny birds of prey. Ankylosaurs were large herbivores with short legs and broad, flat bodies. In relation to animals like Stegosaurus, it was covered in bony carapace plates and spikes that likely protected it from hungry predators.
According to the study, Vectipelta is closely related to the Chinese ankylosaurs. According to the team led by Stuart Bond of the Natural History Museum in London, this indicates that dinosaurs were able to move freely from Asia to Europe at that time. The researchers explain that relatively few dinosaur fossil remains are known from that time. So some experts hypothesize that there may have been a mass extinction of animals in the late Jurassic period (about 150 million years ago). Therefore understanding the diversity of dinosaurs during this period is crucial to understanding whether such an event occurred and how life recovered later.
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