Jakapil

What it was like

Jakapil was a small armored plant eater that probably walked on its hind legs. Rows of bony plates protected its back, and it had a short, deep face with leaf-shaped teeth.

It belongs to an early branch of the armored dinosaurs, the group that also led to the stegosaurs and ankylosaurs. Most members of that early branch had died out long before, so Jakapil shows that some lasted far longer than scientists expected.

Its world

It lived about 113 to 110 million years ago, in the Early Cretaceous, in what is now Argentina. Its bones come from the Candeleros Formation, where giant sauropods such as Andesaurus and Limaysaurus lived, along with the huge predator Giganotosaurus and the small hunter Buitreraptor.

How it was found

Riguetti and colleagues named Jakapil in 2022 from one partial skeleton. Its name comes from a local language of the region, not from Greek or Latin.