Once upon a time, in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, live animals that rely on their tails as self-defense weapons. Stegosaurus and Ankylosaurus are some of them.
If they feel threatened, they will pound their tails or swing their deadly tail.
However, an intriguing question arises when today we rarely find animals that have similar traits to them. Although hedgehogs have thorns and some lizards hit their tails when threatened, they have no bone weapons on the tail like millions of years ago.
Could this be a form of evolution failure? Or has the extinction preceded them before they could have evolved?
To help understand it, paleontologists try to incorporate a set of characteristics that correlate with tail-tailed species.
From that analysis too, researchers will further understand why their weapons disappear since dinosaurs and extinct ice animals.
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, identifies the characteristics of terrestrial, non-avian mammals, reptiles and dinosaurs.
They collect nearly 300 species of data and insert each of these characteristics into a computer, such as which one is herbivorous or has a tail into a computer.
After sifting through it, the researchers concluded 3 similarities of animal characteristics that have tailed weapons. The characteristics are large, plant-eating or herbivorous, and have a very strong body layer as a protector.
These findings led the research team to hypothesize that evolution in tailed-armed animals is difficult because it requires the extraordinary features rarely possessed by living things.
"It's a very rare combination anytime of the year, a unique combination that explains why animals with rare-tailed weapons are found, even in the fossil record," said Victoria Arbor, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto and researchers involved in the study.
Though not yet fully responding to their extinction, this study has become a prefix that opens new perceptions of how fossil records can be used to understand our world again.