The Atlantic

This Dinosaur Had a Mohawk of Horns

A pair of two-foot-long spines, running down the neck of <em>Bajadasaurus</em>, might have presented a “disturbing fence” to lurking predators.

Updated 4:31 p.m. ET on February 5, 2019.

Four years after he first came across an unidentified dinosaur in southern Argentina, the paleontologist Pablo Gallina uncovered one of its neck bones and got a surprise.

In 2010, he had found a set of dinosaur teeth in Bajada Colorada. This area is rich in fossils, but because many of them are in fragile condition, Gallina had decided not to expose the teeth any further. Instead, he and his colleagues from CONICET, the Argentine government’s science agency, excavated a large chunk of surrounding earth, packed it in a plaster jacket, and took it back to their lab to carefully extract whatever bones lay within.

Gradually, the team exposed more teeth,

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