The earliest ankylosaur on the fossil record sported the most extreme adornments ever seen in a vertebrate animal, even other ankylosaurs.

Spicomellus afer , which lived during the Middle Jurassic more than 165 million years ago, wore spikes not just along its body and on its clubbed tail, but in elaborate rings of huge spikes around its neck and hips.

"I've spent my career working on armored dinosaurs but I'd never seen anything like this," paleontologist Susannah Maidment of the London Natural History Museum told ScienceAlert.

"There were so many shapes and sizes of spikes: some joined together to make spikey compound structures; several ribs with spikes attached to their top surfaces; tear-drop shaped plates; and a whole bunch of things that I couldn't even identify. And then ther

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