50 Fun Facts About Stegosaurus

What does the name Stegosaurus mean?

Marsh thought the plates lay flat over the back like roof tiles; only later finds showed they stood on edge.

Stegosaurus lived during which period?

About 155 to 145 million years ago, roughly 80 million years before T. rex; the two never met outside cartoons.

Besides the western United States, Stegosaurus fossils have been found in which European country?

A fragmentary specimen from the Lourinhã Formation was tentatively assigned to S. stenops in 2007.

What did Stegosaurus most likely eat?

Its small head and short neck suggest browsing no more than a metre up, unless it could rear on its hind legs as Robert Bakker proposed.

How many Stegosaurus species are universally recognised from the Morrison Formation?

S. stenops, S. ungulatus and S. sulcatus; the original type species, S. armatus, turned out to be too fragmentary to use.

By 21st-century consensus, the tail spikes were for defence and the plates were for what?

Grooves for blood vessels once suggested radiators, but a keratin covering and Kentrosaurus's spiky alternative weaken the cooling idea.

The largest S. ungulatus specimens measured about how long?

And weighed over five tonnes; S. stenops was a little smaller at around 6.5 metres.

Stegosaurus was first identified by Othniel Charles Marsh during which famous rivalry?

The first scraps came from north of the town of Morrison in 1877; Marsh briefly thought they belonged to a turtle-like aquatic animal.

Marsh initially believed the first Stegosaurus remains came from what?

Hence 'roof lizard': he pictured the plates lying flat and overlapping like shingles.

Which body replaced the dubious type species S. armatus with S. stenops?

Marsh had also lumped Diplodocus teeth and a theropod shin into the original specimen, which did not help.

Where was the nearly complete, articulated S. stenops skeleton of 1885 collected?

Marshall Felch dug it up in labelled blocks near Cañon City; it included the first complete skull and throat ossicles.

What does the species name stenops mean?

S. ungulatus is the 'hoofed' one, named for its preserved foot, and S. sulcatus the 'furrowed' one.

The first ever mounted Stegosaurus skeleton went on display in 1910 where?

Richard Swann Lull mounted it with paired plates; it was rebuilt in 1924 with two staggered rows.

Which plate arrangement has been the prevailing view since the early 1960s?

Some S. stenops fossils preserve the plates partly articulated in exactly that staggered pattern.

The paired double-row plate arrangement appeared in Charles Knight's 1901 painting and which 1933 film?

Knight's 1897 illustration was the basis for the film's stop-motion Stegosaurus puppet.

How many plates and flat spines did a Stegosaurus carry?

The largest sat over the hips and could be more than 60 cm wide and 60 cm tall.

Skin impressions from the related Hesperosaurus show the plates were covered in what?

That would have strengthened them and given sharp edges, but also insulated them, which argues against a radiator role.

The Stegosaurus braincase was no larger than that of which animal?

Marsh's 1880s endocast showed the smallest brain, proportionally, of any dinosaur then known, perhaps 80 grams in a 4.5-tonne animal.

Marsh noticed a large canal in the hip region of the spinal cord, spawning what popular idea?

The space could have held something 20 times bigger than the brain; in birds the same spot holds a glycogen body of uncertain function.

Which palaeontologist disputed the "second brain" myth in an article about the 1932 American Museum mount?

The 1932 New York mount was a composite of partial remains from Bone Cabin Quarry filled in with replicas.

How many toes did each Stegosaurus hind foot have?

The fore feet had five, but only the inner two carried a blunt hoof; pads behind the toes supported all four limbs.

What is the name for the arrangement of spikes on a Stegosaurus tail?

It has no formal anatomical origin at all: it came from a joke in a newspaper cartoon.

Which cartoonist coined the name for the Stegosaurus tail-spike cluster in a 1982 Far Side strip?

A Far Side caveman lecturer explains the spikes are named 'after the late Thag Simmons'; palaeontologist Ken Carpenter adopted it in 1993.

How many tail spikes did S. stenops have?

Marsh first credited S. ungulatus with eight, but re-examination found it had four too, each 60 to 90 cm long.

Articulated armour shows the tail spikes protruded which way?

That is not how most old illustrations drew them, and it makes a sideways tail-swipe far more dangerous.

What proportion of Stegosaurus specimens in one study had injuries to their tail spikes?

That much trauma suggests the spikes saw real combat rather than serving only for show.

A tail spike fits perfectly into a punctured tail vertebra of which dinosaur?

The spike went in from below at an angle, and remodelled bone shows the wound got infected.

A 2010 computer model put Stegosaurus's bite force at less than half that of which dog?

At 140 to 275 newtons it could snap green twigs but struggled with anything over 12 mm thick.

Which feature was probably unique to Stegosaurus and a few advanced relatives among ornithischians?

Flat extensions of the lower jaw would have hidden the teeth completely from the side; the front of the mouth had no teeth at all.

Given its short front legs, Stegosaurus's top speed is estimated at about what?

The stubby forelimbs and long hindlimbs gave it the distinctive rounded back and high-held tail.

Tracks found by Matthew Mossbrucker suggest Stegosaurus did what?

Robert Bakker has argued it could also rear up on its hind legs to browse as high as 6 metres.

A 2022 study of lipoxidation signals concluded Stegosaurus's metabolism was what?

It suggested ornithischians in general drifted toward cold-bloodedness from a warm-blooded ancestor.

Which state made Stegosaurus its official state fossil in 1982?

A class of fourth-graders and their teacher Ruth Sawdo at McElwain Elementary in Thornton campaigned for two years to make it happen.

Sophie, the best-preserved Stegosaurus at 85% intact, is displayed where?

Found near Shell, Wyoming, in 2003, she was first nicknamed Sarah and renamed for donor Jeremy Herrmann's daughter.

How many bones does Sophie the Stegosaurus contain?

She is a young adult of unknown sex, 5.8 metres long and 2.9 metres tall.

The Stegosaurus 'Apex' sold in July 2024 for how much, the most ever paid for a fossil?

The 27-foot skeleton was found on private land in 2022; its buyer has made it available for research, but private ownership remains controversial.

Which auction house sold Apex in New York?

Being found on private land is what allowed it to be sold to a private owner at all.

The earliest popular image of Stegosaurus, an 1884 engraving in Scientific American, showed it how?

Auguste-Michel Jobin even covered its back in spikes, apparently misreading Marsh's description of the odd teeth.

Stegosaurus made its major public debut as a papier-mâché model at which 1904 event?

The St Louis model later moved to Portland, then the Smithsonian, and now sits in the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca.

Which sauropods shared the Morrison Formation with Stegosaurus?

It also lived alongside a long list of theropods, from Ceratosaurus and Torvosaurus down to little Ornitholestes.

Stegosaurus's plates and spines evolved from what ancestral structures?

The same starting point produced the shields and spikes of the ankylosaurs, their sister group.

Which stegosaur lacks a distinct spike cluster at the tail tip, its last spikes blending into the rest?

Its many low spikes rather than plates are also one argument against the plates being for cooling.

Stegosaurus's plates were largest over which part of the body?

Those hip plates could exceed 60 cm in both height and width; a 2010 review suggested plate outlines helped species recognise each other.

The remains of roughly how many individual Stegosaurus have been found?

Yet complete skeletons are rare, so many museums display composites built from several animals.

How was a Stegosaurus mount typically assembled at major museums, given the lack of complete skeletons?

Mounted Stegosaurus skeletons did not become a museum staple until the mid-20th century.

Near which Colorado town were the first Stegosaurus bones collected by Arthur Lakes in 1877?

Those fragmentary bones became the holotype of S. armatus, and Marsh mistakenly lumped Diplodocus teeth and an Allosaurus shin in with them.

Which Wyoming fossil site yielded the type specimen of S. ungulatus in 1879?

Lakes and William Harlow Reed dug it from Quarry 13; the same site later fed the first expeditions of the Second Dinosaur Rush.

Roughly how much did a Stegosaurus brain weigh, despite a body of over 4.5 tonnes?

That ratio fed the old idea that all dinosaurs were unintelligent, a notion now largely rejected.

What does the species name of Stegosaurus ungulatus mean?

Specimens referred to it by their notched tail vertebrae carry only four tail spikes.

Sophie, the London Stegosaurus, was dug up in 2004 by crews from a museum in which country?

The Sauriermuseum team first nicknamed the skeleton Sarah after the landowner's daughter at Red Canyon Ranch near Shell, Wyoming.