A newly discovered species of ankylosaur had a bizarre club on its tail unlike that of any known dinosaur.
With its flat surface and sharp blades along the sides, this unique structure at the back end of Stegouros elengassen, a species of ankylosaur that lived between 72 million and 75 million years ago, strongly resembles an Aztec war club called a macuahuitl, say paleontologist Sergio Soto-Acuña and colleagues. The tail’s shape may indicate an early evolutionary split in the ankylosaur lineage, the researchers report online December 1 in Nature.
Soto-Acuña, of the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, and his team identified the new species based on a nearly complete
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