Oldest ankylosaur

The oldest known species of ankylosaur dinosaur – a group sometimes described as “living tanks” owing to their extensive body armour – is Spicomellus afer, which lived in the Middle Jurassic period, up to 168 million years ago. Its fossilized remains have to date only been found in what is now Morocco, making it the first known of its kind discovered on the continent of Africa. The initial findings describing this new species were set out in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution on 23 September 2021.

The species name translates as “collar of spikes” (Spicomellus) “of Africa” (afer).

The 2021 study was a collaboration between scientists from the Natural History Museum, the University of Birmingham, University College London, University of Brighton (all UK), SMBA University (Morocco), University of Zurich (Switzerland) and University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), led by Dr Susannah Maidment (UK).

A more extensive set of bones of S. afer were recently unearthed near the town of Boulemane in Morocco’s Middle Atlas Mountains and described in the journal Nature, published on 27 August 2025. From these remains, the researchers estimate that the dinosaur would have been roughly 4 m (13 ft) long and weighed 1–2 tonnes (1.1–2.2 tons).

As well as confirming the long hypothesized earlier origin – until S. afer, ankylosaur fossils all predominantly dated to the Cretaceous period, starting 145 million years ago – the latest more complete fossilized specimen has also given palaeontologists a better sense of what form its armour took, with some surprising findings. Much of its body seems to have been punctuated with very long protective dermal spikes, some fused directly to the skeleton, which is a phenomenon never previously encountered in the animal kingdom. It’s estimated that the longest of this dinosaur’s bony protrusions were located in the collar around the neck (though these were not joined to the skeleton) and would have grown to more than 1 m (3 ft 3 in), akin to golf clubs; the biggest intact example among the fossils is 87 cm (2 ft 10 in) in length.