Fanged dinosaur feasted on fruit

• Pegomastax africanus is an ankle-high, two-legged dinosaur discovered in South Africa
• The dinosaur boasted one-inch fangs perfect for feasting on fruit
• Discoverer Paul Sereno found the fossil in rock samples uncovered in a dig by Harvard researchers

Fangs and feasting on fruit don't seem to go together, but for one pint-sized dinosaur the combination worked just fine 200 million years ago, reports paleontologist Paul Sereno.

Meet Pegomastax africanus, or "thick jaw from Africa," an ankle-high, two-legged dinosaur discovered in South Africa and reported Wednesday in the journal ZooKeys by Sereno, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. Only 2 feet long, the tiny dinosaur sported inch-long fangs in its jaws, crowning a scissors-like set of teeth perfect for slicing into the flesh of fruit, but not so much other critters.

"Pegomastax and kin were the most advanced plant-eaters of their day," Sereno says in a statement, among the earliest to spread widely across the continents with fossils found in England and South Africa today.

Most likely, the fangs came in handy for sparring or nipping others of its kind, he concludes. The newly-reported species turned up in specimens stored at Harvard from a 1960s dig. When it lived, Pegomastax likely was covered with a coat of bristles seen in a related species discovered in China called Tianyulong, and

looked like a "nimble two-legged porcupine," Sereno says.