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Description
WARNING: The following is an April Fool's Day prank. A proper version of this illustration can be found here. I'd like to apologize for any hurt feelings, but think of it like this: if this had been a test, everyone who found out it was a hoax would have passed with flying colours! Sadly many will ignore the descriptions to images entirely, and of those who do read them, many neglect to check the primary sources even when they are easily available. You weren't those people!

Anyway, here's the little hoax, preserved for posterity:

Here's my take on the cool new basal ornithischian from South Africa that everyone should be talking about, but probably aren't, because of Daspletosaurus horneri. I actually got some inside info this dinosaur a while ago and have been sitting on this, waiting to finish the details when the paper gets published.

So why is Hylaeodromaeus so cool? First of all, it's a basal ornithischian that may be from the Late Triassic, but definitely Early Jurassic at the latest, putting it close to the divergence point of Ornithischia. What's even better is that it also has clear impressions of scales on its skull! There are preserved scales on the premaxilla, maxilla and the nasals, and they're surprisingly large and (at least to my eye) reminiscent of the facial scales of some modern lizards. And here's the really big thing: it appears that the labial scales overlap the teeth on the predentary and dentary, forming a kind of lip. So even if it turns out tyrannosaurs didn't have lips, basal ornithiscians did! It also seems likely to me that they didn't have cheeks, at least in this early stage, though this is just my personal speculation.

While I did my best to depict the known scales and the lip accurately, most of the soft tissue detail on the face is speculative, including the filaments that I based on Kulindadromeus. If you'd like to know more, you should head to PLOS ONE to read the original source: Ahmed E. Jenedi; Janosek U. Hüpp (2017) "A New Basal Ornithischian with Preserved Craniofacial Integument from the Late Triassic Elliott Fromation, South Africa". http ://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0175552

Description
WARNING: The following is an April Fool's Day prank. A proper version of this illustration can be found here. I'd like to apologize for any hurt feelings, but think of it like this: if this had been a test, everyone who found out it was a hoax would have passed with flying colours! Sadly many will ignore the descriptions to images entirely, and of those who do read them, many neglect to check the primary sources even when they are easily available. You weren't those people!

Anyway, here's the little hoax, preserved for posterity:

Here's my take on the cool new basal ornithischian from South Africa that everyone should be talking about, but probably aren't, because of Daspletosaurus horneri. I actually got some inside info this dinosaur a while ago and have been sitting on this, waiting to finish the details when the paper gets published.

So why is Hylaeodromaeus so cool? First of all, it's a basal ornithischian that may be from the Late Triassic, but definitely Early Jurassic at the latest, putting it close to the divergence point of Ornithischia. What's even better is that it also has clear impressions of scales on its skull! There are preserved scales on the premaxilla, maxilla and the nasals, and they're surprisingly large and (at least to my eye) reminiscent of the facial scales of some modern lizards. And here's the really big thing: it appears that the labial scales overlap the teeth on the predentary and dentary, forming a kind of lip. So even if it turns out tyrannosaurs didn't have lips, basal ornithiscians did! It also seems likely to me that they didn't have cheeks, at least in this early stage, though this is just my personal speculation.

While I did my best to depict the known scales and the lip accurately, most of the soft tissue detail on the face is speculative, including the filaments that I based on Kulindadromeus. If you'd like to know more, you should head to PLOS ONE to read the original source: Ahmed E. Jenedi; Janosek U. Hüpp (2017) "A New Basal Ornithischian with Preserved Craniofacial Integument from the Late Triassic Elliott Fromation, South Africa". http ://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0175552