Smithsonian Magazine has an article about a weird ankylosaur. Its name is Spicomellus afer, and it lived about 165 million years ago during the Jurassic Period. It had three-foot-long spikes around its collar and plates down its shoulders…. great armor against the predators that lived with it in the flood plains of what is now northern Africa. Read the full description in a paper in the journal Nature. “When we originally named Spicomellus, there were doubts that it was an ankylosaur at all,” says Susannah Maidment, a paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum, in a statement. “Now, not only can we confirm beyond a…

The New York Times’ Trilobite column has an interesting story about a fierce crocodile that lived alongside the dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Period about 72 million years ago. Kostensuchus measured about 11½ feet long and weighed 551 pounds. The fossils were found in March 2020 in Santa Cruz, a province in Argentina. The animal was described in a paper in the journal PLOS One. While North America and Asia had their share of Cretaceous crocodiles, they were mostly from families that had evolved a semiaquatic lifestyle. But crocodiles took a different trajectory in South America and Africa, where several families walked…