BREAKING: Spicomellus afer — Paleontologists Just Revealed the Strangest “Hedgehog” Dinosaur in History from Morocco — the Oldest Ankylosaur on Earth and the First Ever Found in Africa!

In a revelation that upends decades of ᴀssumptions about armored dinosaur evolution, scientists have unveiled a dramatically more complete skeleton of Spicomellus afer — a creature so extravagantly spiked it resembled a four-meter-long, two-tonne hedgehog crossed with a medieval war machine.12 Living 165–168 million years ago during the Middle Jurᴀssic in what is now Morocco, this beast is not only the oldest definitive ankylosaur yet discovered but also the first — and so far only — member of this iconic group ever found on the African continent.

When a single rib bone with spikes fused directly to its surface surfaced in 2019 and was formally named in 2021, paleontologists were already astonished; no vertebrate, living or extinct, had ever exhibited such anatomy. Doubts remained about its exact classification. Then, in 2023, an international team led by Professor Susannah Maidment of London’s Natural History Museum and Professor Richard Butler located the precise quarry near Boulemane in Morocco’s Middle Atlas Mountains. The new fossils, described in a landmark Nature paper in August 2025, silence all skepticism.

Spicomellus afer (“spiny African collar”) was a quadrupedal herbivore encased in armor unlike anything seen before. Meter-long bony spikes — some reaching 87 cm and likely longer with keratin sheaths — erupted from a dramatic bony collar around its neck. Even more bizarre, many spikes were fused directly to the ribs and other bones, eliminating typical muscle attachment points and raising profound questions about how the animal even moved. Blade-like plates ran along its sides, spikes projected from its hips, and “handle” vertebrae in the tail confirm it wielded a club-like weapon — pushing back the evolution of ankylosaur tail weaponry by more than 30 million years.

“We’ve never seen anything like this in any animal before,” said Maidment. “It’s absolutely bizarre.” Butler described it as “one of the strangest dinosaurs that we’ve ever discovered… bristling with spikes all over its body” and an “armoured collar that is absolutely enormous and totally out of proportion.” The team speculates this extravagant ornamentation served display and dominance functions — Sєxual selection or rival intimidation — before ankylosaur armor later simplified into purely defensive plates in the Cretaceous, possibly in response to rising predation pressure or shifting mating behaviors.

The implications cut sharply. For years, textbooks portrayed ankylosaurs as evolving primarily in northern continents (Laurasia) with relatively straightforward defensive adaptations appearing later. Spicomellus proves the group was already experimenting with extreme, energetically costly armor on Gondwana in the Middle Jurᴀssic. Africa was not a sideshow but a cradle of flamboyant evolutionary innovation. The fusion of osteoderms directly to the skeleton suggests sophisticated developmental biology far earlier than expected, while the early tail weapon overturns tidy timelines of when key ankylosaurian traits appeared.

This discovery also carries a deeper message about paleontology itself. Collaboration with Moroccan scientists such as Driss Ouarhache highlights the untapped richness of North African Middle Jurᴀssic sites and pushes back against Eurocentric narratives that long marginalized Gondwanan fossils. As Maidment notes, such finds demonstrate “just how significant Africa’s dinosaurs are.”

Spicomellus afer doesn’t just add another oddball to the dinosaur roster. It forces us to rethink the pace, place, and creativity of evolution itself. The earliest armored dinosaurs were not primitive tanks but flamboyant experimenters whose “hedgehog” extravagance reveals that nature’s strangest ideas often appeared first — and in the most unexpected places. As excavations continue in Morocco, more surprises surely await. The dawn of the ankylosaurs just got a lot spikier.