It had a face that only a mother could love, according to a member of a research team that dug up a rare dinosaur in Madagascar. "I think it is weird, wonderful and ugly all at the same time," said Dr Scott Sampson of the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the New York Institute of Technology. "It is one of the best preserved dinosaurs ever found."
Dr Sampson published details of his discovery in the current issue of Science, with co-author Dr David Krause of the State University of New York at Stonybrook. The 65- to 70-million-year-old fossils were attributed to an animal called Majungatholus atopus, but dinosaurs of the day did not laugh at its looks - it was a serious meat eater.
It had been known for over a century that a theropod had stalked Madagascar, but the evidence was based almost solely on hundreds of isolated teeth, each of them bearing the tiny serrations typical of the carnivore.
"Our primary goal was to find the owner of those teeth and, as luck would have it, we hit the palaeontological jackpot," explained Dr Sampson, whose work was funded by the US National Science Foundation.
While scientists are delighted to have found almost perfectly preserved fossils, they are equally excited at what the discovery tells them about dinosaur evolution and about the shifting of the continents over millions of years, Dr Sampson explained.
A great deal is known about northern hemisphere meat-eaters such as Tyrannosaurus Rex, but Majungatholus belongs to an enigmatic group of theropods known as abelisaurids. The few abelisaurid fossils discovered have mostly come from India, South America and now Madagascar, three locations separated by enormous tracts of ocean.
Scientists were interested to see that Majungatholus shared numerous specialised features with the horned Argentinian theropod, Carnotaurus. Clearly they were related in some way - the chances of a near duplicate evolution of two very specialised animals on opposite sides of the Earth flew in the face of evolution.
Readers with a knowledge of plate tectonics - the study of how the Earth's land masses have wheeled and pivoted across the planet's surface over millions of years - will point out that the abelisaurids could have shared a common continent when Madagascar, South America and India were all part of a single great supercontinent.
This would have allowed fossils of related dinosaurs to appear on widely separated land masses.
The age of these fossils is what has provoked the particular interest of geologists, however. These dinosaurs were chomping plant-eaters in the Late Cretaceous period, 65 to 70 million years ago.
The supercontinent, Gondwana, was thought to have fragmented long before this. But the abelisaurids, particularly the new fossils from Madagascar, suggest that South America, Madagascar and India were somehow still connected.
"Here we find halfway round the world in Madagascar a dead ringer for the Argentinian dinosaur," Dr Sampson said. "This find suggests maybe the continents were connected longer than we thought."
He added: "Dinosaurs and other land animals may have been able to disperse across the vast distances between South America and India-Madagascar via an intervening Antarctica."
The Majungatholus will contribute to our understanding of dinosaur evolution, filling in gaps about the southern hemisphere meat-eaters. Dr Sampson believes that the Madagascar animal died and was quickly covered by material deposited during a flood.
This protected the bones from predators and the elements. Dr Sampson was delighted as well that the skull was found broken into pieces.
Intact skulls make it more difficult for scientists to see an animal's internal structures, such as connection points for muscles, blood vessels and other tissues.
These findings can be compared with anatomical details of modern animals. All the bits of the skull were so well preserved that they were reassembled as simply as a child's wooden puzzle.