Adratiklit, the first North African stegosaur

[Halichoeres]

Meet Adratiklit boulahfa (Berber: "mountain lizard of Boulahfa"), the first stegosaur to be found in North Africa, and the oldest definite stegosaur anywhere. The authors show evidence that stegosaurs were probably more abundant in Gondwana than the fossil record would lead us to believe (see the stegosaur footprints in Australia, for example). Here's a visual summary of the paper:


(left: holotype vertebra; middle: type locality in Morocco; right: accumulation curves showing that stegosaurs/ankylosaurs are both rare in the fossil record and tend to be ignored in favor of boring old theropods)

And a reconstruction of Adratiklit by Joschua Knüppe (from Twitter):



Paper (paywall): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1342937X19302217

[stegosauria]

I hope they will find those hiding stegosaurs. The group needs more variety than a herd of Chinese genus and a few other from Europe.

What are the texts in the curve? They became too blurry to read.

And I love this illustration. Now my old (a few years old) background pictures were changed for this beauty.

[Halichoeres]

I hope they will find those hiding stegosaurs. The group needs more variety than a herd of Chinese genus and a few other from Europe.

What are the texts in the curve? They became too blurry to read.

And I love this illustration. Now my old (a few years old) background pictures were changed for this beauty.

Ah, I should have included that.

Blue: Dinosaur bearing formations
Red: Dinosaur bearing collections
Green: Eurypodan [ankylosaurs + stegosaurs] occurrences

[Shonisaurus]

Although only fragmented remains of this stegosaurus are known, I wish that in the future Collecta, Eofauna, Safari or PNSO, for example, make an adratiklit boulahfa in the collecting / toy market.

[stegosauria]

So the vertical axis is numbers and the horizontal one is the time in million years. The blue line shows how many dinosaur bearing formations are known. And the red line means how many dinosaur species are collected and known from these formations? And the green lines which are the stegosaurs and ankylosaurs together (and without the basal forms) always near the zero level except one peak at 150 mya while the red and blue lines are following a similar shape. Interesting and bad news for the fans of these groups. This diagram is for the whole world or just for Gondwana?

They didn't use Thyreophora because the basal forms would just bother the statistisc?

I think stegosaurs and ankylosaurs were quite solitary animals. Those are always rarer than the animals which live in herds or other groups.

Thanks for the answer!

[ZoPteryx]

Wow, makes me wonder what weird forms of stegosaurs await discovery in Gondwana!