The most ancient animal ever found in Asia could be the oldest in the world.
The beastie was small for a stegosaur, measuring just over 9 feet from its nose to the tip of its spiny tail, during the Middle Jurassic Bajocian age.
It is unclear if the specimen is an adult or baby, but it could tell us more about how the stegosaurus evolved.
There were bones from the shoulder, back, thigh, feet, spine, and ribs. The team of paleontologists led by Dai Hui from the Bureau of Geological and Mineral Resource Exploration and Development were able to make comparisons with other species.
Some of the features of Bashanosaurus primitivus seem to be unique to that animal. Its shoulder is smaller and less developed, its thighbone is slightly different, and its armor plates are thicker at the base.
It is similar to the first armored dinosaurs, which lived 20 million years earlier. This suggests that Bashanosaurus is a missing link between the older dinosaurs and the later stegosaurs.
Bashanosaurus is clearly a new species and can be distinguished from other Middle Jurassic stegosaurs.
Our analysis of the family tree shows that it is one of the earliest-diverging stegosaurs along with the Chongqing Lizard. These were all unearthed from the Middle to the Late Jurassic period in China, suggesting that they may have originated in Asia.
Stegosaurs are some of the most beloved dinosaurs. The beast was protected with armor down the length of its spine and spikes at the end of it's tail, so that it wouldn't hurt anyone.
A tiny little head is one of the characteristics of a tank-like body.
Bashanosaurus appears to have had the same physical characteristics as the rest of the genus. It bears some similarities with the armored dinosaurs from which stegosaurs emerged, as well as early stegosaurs from China.
There are similarities between the tail vertebrae and the shoulder blade, as well as a lack of deep depressions in the spine. The similarities and differences suggest that Bashanosaurus is an important discovery for understanding the family tree.
The discovery of this stegosaur from the Middle Jurassic of China adds to an increasing body of evidence that the group evolved in the early Middle Jurassic, or perhaps even in the Early Jurassic, and as such represent some of the earliest known bird-hipped dinosaurs.
China seems to have been a hot spot for stegosaur diversity, with numerous species now known from the Middle Jurassic right the way through until the end of the Early Cretaceous period.
The research was published in a journal.
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