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 Plenty, according to the scientists who on Wednesday
announced the discovery in Spain's Cuenca province of
beautifully preserved fossils of this creature.
They gave it the scientific name Xenokeryx amidalae, meaning
"strange horn of Amidala," referring to the "Star Wars"
character Queen Amidala, played by actress Natalie Portman.
The peculiar shape of Xenokeryx's largest horn was "extremely
similar to one of the hairstyles that Amidala shows off in 'Star
Wars' Episode 1 when she is the queen of her home planet Naboo,"
said paleontologist Israel Sanchez of the National Museum of
Natural History in Madrid.
Xenokeryx was a herbivore about as big as an average deer. The
males had two small horns like those of a giraffe above the eyes
and a larger one shaped a bit like the letter "T" on the back of
the head. The males also boasted enlarged sabre-like upper
canines that likely were used for display to impress other
members of the species, Sanchez said.
Females were hornless and fangless.
Xenokeryx lived in a warm grassland environment with rivers
alongside rhinos, elephant relatives, deer, horses, crocodiles
and "bear-dogs," a now-extinct group of large predators.
Xenokeryx probably ate leaves, fruit and roots.
The modern animals most closely related to Xenokeryx are the
giraffe and the okapi, both found in Africa, although Xenokeryx
did not have their long necks, Sanchez said.
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It belongs to an extinct group of ruminants called palaeomerycids
whose fossils have been found from Spain to China. Ruminants today
include cattle, sheep, goats, deer, giraffes and antelopes. These
mammals typically have a stomach divided into four compartments and
chew a cud consisting of regurgitated, partially digested
vegetation.
The discovery of the Xenokeryx fossils, one adult individual and two
juveniles, enabled the scientists to determine where palaeomerycids
belonged in the ruminant family tree, ending a decades-long debate,
Sanchez said.
"It is strange, it posed a good phylogenetic (evolutionary history)
problem, it is fun to reconstruct and it is a window to the marvels
of the past," Sanchez said of Xenokeryx. "In this case, being a
life-long 'Star Wars' fan, it was great to mix my two passions."
The research was published in the journal PLOS ONE.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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