We have come to a cousin of one of our first dinos on this alphabetical series, Carnotaurus, and this cousin may just be a contender for world’s ugliest dino, with its name literally meaning ‘wrinkly face’. Rugops was discovered by Paul Sereno in Niger and was a basal abelisaurid from the Early Cretaceous.
Rugops means wrinkled face and it was the first abelisaur to have a textured skull. Its skull has a very wrinkly tip at the snout and it also had a lot of grooves and depressions above the nostrils. Such depressions may have corresponded to scales, or anchors for some crest or wattle-like structure, kinda like chickens and turkeys have. However, this is not proven.
Rugops was a very basal/primitive abelisaur, although it wasn’t the earliest. It lived in North Africa, while abelisaurs originated in India and Madagascar (at the time, the two landmasses were connected to each other and mainland Africa). However, the most famous ones, like Carnotaurus and Abelisaurus, packed their bags and moved to Patagonia in South America.
Rugops lived alongside dinosaurs such as Ouranosaurus, a hadrosaur like Lambeosaurus that had a sail on its back, Spinosaurus (also with a sail on its back), and Carcharodontosaurus, of which the latter two were one of the biggest predators, larger than T-rex. Rugops was incredibly outmatched as a predator, which is one of the reasons why scientists think it was a scavenger feeding on the leftovers of Carcharodontosaurus and Spinosaurus, not to mention distant cousins of Rugops like the slender and medium-sized Deltadromeus.
We don’t really know that much about Rugops, but we sure do know that it’s one of the ugliest dinos ever 🙂
Anay Ganesh 