What is Jakapil kaniukura?

Riguetti, Apesteguía and Pereda‑Suberbiola 2022
have put together the bits and pieces of a Mid-Late Cretaceous (95mya) bipedal armored phytodinosaur, Jakapil kaniukura, MPCA-PV-630 (Fig 1). The authors restored most of the bones of Jakapil based on phylogenetic bracketing. Their cladogram nested their find with two quadrupedal early Jurassic armored dinosaurs, Scutellosaurus and Scelidosaurus (Fig 2) and a third pre-stegosaur, Isaberrysaura, all lacking the strong predentary found in Jakapil.

The extremely deep mid-mandible of Jakapil is a distinct character.
A precursor deep mid-mandible can be found in the earlier basal ceratopsian, Yinlong (Fig 1) from the Late Jurassic of China. And it has a strong predentary. Like Jakapil, Yinlong is a biped with a similar, small, hockey-stick scapula and small forelimbs not seen in recovered sister taxa (Fig 2). Yinlong was tested by the authors, but it lacks bony scutes. In the LRT (Fig 3) Scelidosaurus was in the ancestry of Yinlong. Given what little is preserved of Jakapil (Fig 1) perhaps more weight was put on the scute traits during original scoring. Too few bones are known from the Jakapil holotype to attempt to nest it in the LRT.

References
Riguetti FJ, Apesteguía S and Pereda‑Suberbiola X 2022. A new Cretaceous thyreophoran from Patagonia supports a South American lineage of armoured dinosaurs. Nature Scientific Reports 12:11621

wiki/Jakapil