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This charming dinosaur is called Ubirajara jubatus and it had some fancy features.
Bob Nicholls / Paleocreations.com 2020
Some dinosaurs are known for their magnificent mass. Hello, brontosaurus. Some have a fierce reputation for eating meat. I’m looking at you, T. rex. Now he meets Ubirajara jubatus. It wasn’t big, but it was glorious.
Ubirajara jubatus was a hen-sized dinosaur and was quite attractive. In a statement released Monday, the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom characterized it as “the most elaborately dressed dinosaur to impress ever described.”
Ubirajara jubatus lived 110 million years ago in what is now Brazil. A team led by researchers from the University of Portsmouth published a study on the dinosaur in the journal Cretaceous Research this month.
The delicate dinosaur would have been decked out in a long shaggy mane with long ribbons made of keratin, the same as human hair and fingernails, which extend from its shoulders. It would have been quite a show in its day. Well-preserved fossil evidence shows that it could probably raise and lower its mane.
The researchers suggest that the dinosaur’s graceful features could have played a role in mating displays as we see with modern birds like peacocks. “Given its quirkiness, we can imagine that the dinosaur may have indulged in elaborate dances to showcase its display structures,” said co-author David Martill, a paleobiologist at the university.
Although the researchers cannot say for sure whether the fossil is male or female, they suspect it was male. According to co-author Robert Smyth, “It represents a revolution in dinosaur communication, the effects of which we can still see today in living birds.”
