Pegomastax africanus: A Heterodontosaur with Bristles?

A new, tiny dinosaur with vampire-like fangs devoured ... plants?

So says a new study of Pegomastax africanus, a 2-foot-long (0.6-meter-long) heterodontosaur that lived about 200 million years ago.

[...]

Covered in porcupine-like quills and sporting a blunt, parrot-like beak, P. africanus would've looked like a "strange little bird," said Sereno, a paleontologist with the University of Chicago.

[...]

While preparing a comprehensive analysis of the little-known heterodontosaurs, Sereno identified P. africanus from fossils at Harvard University, which had been collected in South Africa in the 1960s.

To find out what the newfound dinosaur did with its sharp fangs, Sereno then reassembled P. africanus' jaw and teeth. He compared the reconstruction to jaws and teeth of both meat-eating dinosaurs and modern plant-eating mammals with fangs.

Sereno discovered that P. africanus' fangs were very similar to those of fanged deer and peccaries, which use their fangs in self-defense and competition for mates, he said.

Supporting this theory, microscopic analysis of P. africanus' fang enamel revealed wear and breakage consistent with sparring.

The researcher suggested too that the cheek teeth in P. africanus' upper and lower jaws worked like self-sharpening scissors for shearing plant parts, as detailed in the study, published online Wednesday in the journal ZooKeys.

Link to Nat Geo article.  Link to paper.

Going to read the paper.  The connection to Zookeys seems to have a craaaazy slow connection for downloading the PDF.  9.8kbps would have been great for ftp in the days of the early 90s.  That was 20 years ago.  yikes.

I'm curious where he gets the quill covering from.  The fossil?  Guessing?

Update:  I won't be able to tell for a while.  It looks like the paper is mangled.  The PDFs are damaged and the HTML version of the paper is cut off mid sentence.