The Strangest Armored Dinosaur Ever: Spicomellus With Bizarre Back Spikes Straight Out of a Godzilla Movie!

In a 2025 paleontological bombshell, Spicomellus afer has been confirmed as history’s most bizarre armored dinosaur—a spiky “Godzilla” ankylosaur from Morocco whose meter-long back and neck spikes look like they escaped a Hollywood monster film.

The near-complete skeleton, described in Nature (October 2025) by Susannah Maidment and colleagues, comes from the 165-million-year-old El Mers III Formation. What stunned researchers was the extreme armor: a ring of sideways-protruding spikes up to 1 meter (3+ feet) long around the neck, plus bizarre, fused osteoderms running down the back and tail—features never seen in any vertebrate, living or extinct.

Even more shocking, the tail shows early “handle” vertebrae, proving the tail-club weapon evolved at least 30 million years earlier than thought. At 4 meters long and ~2 tonnes, this Middle Jurᴀssic plant-eater was a walking fortress bristling with defenses on ancient floodplains.

This upends ankylosaur evolution. Scientists expected simple armor in the oldest members; instead, Spicomellus displays the most elaborate, over-the-top spikes ever recorded. “We’ve never seen anything like this in any animal before,” the team noted.

Dubbed the “real Godzilla” for its cinematic spikes, Spicomellus afer (“spiky armored dinosaur from Africa”) proves armored dinosaurs were already wildly experimenting with extreme defenses by the Middle Jurᴀssic. From the Moroccan desert, this punk-rock tank rewrites the armored dinosaur story with pure prehistoric spectacle.