Dinosaur with ‘hair’ and ‘ribbons’ has scientists enthralled
- The reptile known as Ubirajara jubatus had two unique features protruding from its shoulders, that appear to be ‘protofeathers’
- The odd-looking dinosaur lived 110 million years ago and was the size of a chicken
About 110 million years ago, along the shores of an ancient lagoon in what is now northeastern Brazil, a two-legged chicken-sized Cretaceous Period dinosaur made a living hunting insects and perhaps small vertebrates like frogs and lizards.
On the inside, it was ordinary, with a skeleton similar to many small dinosaurs from the preceding Jurassic Period, scientists said on Tuesday. On the outside, it was anything but.
This dinosaur, called Ubirajara jubatus, possessed a mane of hairlike structures while also boasting two utterly unique, stiff, ribbonlike features probably made of keratin – the same substance that makes up hair and fingernails – protruding from its shoulders.
“There are plenty of other strange dinosaurs, but this one is unlike any of them,” said palaeobiology professor David Martill of the University of Portsmouth in England, who helped lead the study published in the journal Cretaceous Research.
The ribbons that seem to come from the shoulders are like nothing I have seen in nature before
Ubirajara’s hairlike structures appear to be a rudimentary form of feathers called protofeathers. This was not actual hair, an exclusively mammalian feature. Many dinosaurs had feathers. In fact, birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs about 150 million years ago.