Prehistoric wildebeest had a bizarre dinosaur-like head crest

In an ancient streambed on Kenya’s Rusinga Island, scientists have unearthed fossils of a wildebeest-like creature named Rusingoryx that boasted a weird head structure more befitting of a dinosaur than a mammal.

Researchers said on Thursday the crescent-shaped protrusion atop the head of Rusingoryx, which roamed Africa’s savannas tens of thousands of years ago, was unlike anything on any other mammal, past or present. Instead, it resembled the head crests of a group of duckbilled dinosaurs called hadrosaurs.

The hollow structure may have enabled the horned, hoofed grass-eater to produce a low trumpeting sound to communicate over long distances with others in its herd, Ohio University paleontologist Haley O’Brien said.

“This structure was incredibly surprising,” O’Brien said. “To see a hollow nasal crest outside of dinosaurs and in a mammal that lived so recently is very bizarre.”

The fossils of Rusingoryx, about the size of its close cousin the wildebeest, date from about 55,000 to 75,000 years ago. Hadrosaurs with similar nasal structures, Lambeosaurus and Corythosaurus, lived about 75 million years ago.

O’Brien said the structure was an example of “convergent evolution” in which disparate organisms independently evolve similar features, like the wings of birds, bats and the extinct flying reptiles called pterosaurs, to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches.