The fossil of a newly discovered dinosaur shows it possessed a strange, rigid "sail" on its back that may have helped it survive ancient episodes of climate change, paleontologists suggest.
Around 125 million years ago its home region in what is now modern Spain had alternating periods of wet and dry climates, and the dinosaur's sail may have helped it regulate it body temperature, they theorize.
Modern elephants do something similar, the point out, using their large ears to radiate excess body heat away.
Or, perhaps like a camel's hump, the bony sail on the plant-eating dino Morelladon beltrani may have been a place to store fat to keep the animals alive during times of food scarcity, they say.
That could have come in especially handy if the species was a migratory one, they suggest. Although there's no direct evidence M. beltrani migrated, fossil evidence from other dinosaur types found in the region showed they lived in herds that may have periodically migrated with changes in the local environment.
Large modern herbivores, such as elephants or many other species of animals, commonly migrate, the researchers point out.
Morelladon beltrani was named after a quarry near the northeastern Spanish city of Morella where the fossil was unearthed in 2013, and in honor of Victor Beltrán, who assisted at the dig sites around the quarry.
As an herbivore, 14 large teeth in the creature's mouth would have helped it graze on and process tough plant materials, the paleonotologists note.
Fossil evidence for the animal's sail was a row of bony spines, some a foot tall, which would have extended upward from the dinosaur's back.
In life the creature was around 20 feet long and would have stood about 8 feet tall at the shoulder, the researchers say in their study published in PLOS One.
M. beltrani was probably related to plant-eating Iguanodons, one of the most successful dinosaur groups ever, which colonized many regions of the world, the researchers say.
The finding is yet more evidence that Europe in the Early Cretaceous period was host to a large number of different iguanodontian dinosaurs, says study co-author Fernando Escaso of the Evolutionary Biology Group at the National Distance Education University in Madrid.
"We knew the dinosaur fauna from Morella was similar to those of other contemporary European sites," he says. "However, this discovery shows an interesting rise of the iguanodontoid diversity in southern Europe around 125 million years ago."
