" really don't know what it is about dinosaurs with sails. Ever since I was a kid, they've been paleo stars. No book about dinosaurs seemed complete without a Spinosaurus, and the appeal of finbacked saurians was so great that even Dimetrodon – a distant protomammal cousin of ours – has often been erroneously thrown into the Mesozoic mix. Maybe it's simply because they're flashy. Those big sails are basically organic billboards, and, just as flowers evolved to look attractive, maybe there's something similar is going on with those ludicrous neural spines. They stand out because they evolved to.
Spinosaurus, of course, is a major celebrity. Jurassic Park III, crummy as it was, saw to that. But there is another sail-backed dinosaur that I used to see in plenty in pop paleo that has subsequently fallen into the spinosaur's shadow. I'm talking about Ouranosaurus.
This sail-bearing herbivore is still pretty new as dinosaurs go. Paleontologist Philippe Taquet described the dinosaur in 1976 from a bones found in the 125-112 million year old rock of Niger. Even now, the dinosaur is an oddity. While an early cousin of the duck-billed hadrosaurs, Ouranosaurus had a mishmash of features – including thumb spikes, a prominent and perhaps decorative bump on its skull, and, of course, the sail – that would make it stand out in any crowd…."
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