Welcome to Adratiklit
Name Definition
Means “mountain lizard” in Berber (Berber is an ethnic group found in North and West Africa)
Name Given By
Susannah C. R. Maidment, Thomas J. Raven, Driss Ouarhache, Paul M. Barrett in 2019
Location
El Mers II Formation in Morocco, Africa
Classification
Dinosauria, Ornithischia, Thyreophora, Stegosauria, Stegosauridae, Dacentrurinae
Size
roughly 2 meters tall (excluding the plates), 7 meters long (these rough estimates were based off of Dacentrurus as a close relative and was scaled down to the size of the humerus)
Temporal Range
Bathonian - Callovian stages of the Middle Jurassic, around 168 - 164 million years ago
Ecological niche
herbivore with thagomizers as defense
Species/Sub Species
A. boulahfa
Diet
while the dentition is unknown, Adratiklit would have consumed low-lying plants as well as leafy branches by rearing up on its hind legs
Introduction
Adratiklit is a genus of dacentrurine stegosaurids that lived in Morocco during the Middle Jurassic. The genus name means “Mountain lizard” in Berber which is the language of the Berbers, an ethnic group found in North and West Africa. The species name boulahfa refers to Boulahfa which is near where the specimen was found. The species is only represented by several vertebrae and a humerus, and while this may not seem much, it has helped us identify one of the earliest stegosaurids, if not then the earliest, due to Isaberrysaura still being a possibility. Adratiklit is also the first dacentrurine and stegosaurid in general to be found in Gondwana (southern continents) as thyreophoran fossils are extremely rare there, let alone stegosaurs. More cladistic analysis shows that Adratiklit was more related to stegosaurids like Miragaia and Dacentrurus than to other African stegosaurs like Kentrosaurus and Paranthodon, placing it in the subfamily Dacentrurinae.