49 Fun Facts About Stegosaurus

What does the name Stegosaurus mean?

Roof lizard: Marsh pictured the plates lying flat over the back like roof tiles, and only later finds showed that they stood on edge.

Stegosaurus lived during which period?

Late Jurassic: Stegosaurus was gone almost 80 million years before Tyrannosaurus rex appeared, so the two never met outside cartoons, and T. rex lived nearer in time to us than to it.

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

Portugal: a partial skeleton described in 2007 was the first sure Stegosaurus outside North America, evidence that land corridors at times linked Iberia and Newfoundland across the young Atlantic.

Grass had not yet evolved when Stegosaurus lived, so what did it most likely browse on?

Ferns and cycads: the oldest known grass fossils are over 30 million years younger than the last Stegosaurus, so this low browser cropped ferns, cycads, horsetails and other non-flowering greenery.

Which group of dinosaurs are the closest relatives of Stegosaurus and its fellow stegosaurs?

Ankylosaurs: the club-tailed tanks and the stegosaurs both descend from smaller armoured dinosaurs such as Scelidosaurus, but the stegosaurs lost their flank armour and kept plates and spikes along the spine.

Stegosaurus's tail spikes were for defence, but what are its plates now thought likeliest to have been for?

Display, with cooling secondary: the tall plates made the animal look bigger to rivals and predators, and since spikier cousins managed without such radiators, heat control was probably a side benefit.

A dead explorer's sketch of a living Stegosaurus launches the expedition in which Arthur Conan Doyle novel?

The Lost World: Professor Challenger matches Maple White's sketch to a textbook Stegosaurus to argue that dinosaurs survive on a South American plateau, and reporter Malone later watches one drink at a lake by night.

Marsh named Stegosaurus while locked in the Bone Wars, a fossil-hunting feud with which rival?

Edward Drinker Cope: he and Marsh spied on each other's digs and had bones smashed rather than leave them for the other, a feud that filled museums with dinosaurs and ruined both men.

Marsh initially believed the first Stegosaurus remains came from what?

An aquatic turtle-like creature: Marsh read the big flat plates as a shell-like covering on a swimmer, and it took more complete skeletons to reveal a land animal with its plates on edge.

A high-school teacher and his students found the Stegosaurus skeleton long displayed at which city's natural history museum?

Denver: the teacher, from Cañon City High School, came across the bones on a nature hike near fossil beds worked since the Bone Wars, and called in the museum, whose crew dug the skeleton out.

Why is the Smithsonian's prize Stegosaurus skeleton nicknamed 'roadkill'?

Crushed flat as it fossilised: the skeleton lay with its bones still joined, so for all the squashing it was the first to show how the plates sat on a Stegosaurus's back.

What does stenops mean in the species name Stegosaurus stenops?

Narrow-faced: Marsh coined it for the first Stegosaurus found with a complete skull, a long and slender one, and '-ops' is the same Greek word for face that ends Triceratops.

The first mounted Stegosaurus skeleton went on display in 1910 at which museum?

Yale's Peabody Museum: it was endowed by Marsh's wealthy uncle, George Peabody, and the mount was built around the very bones Marsh had used to name Stegosaurus ungulatus.

Which arrangement of Stegosaurus's back plates do most palaeontologists accept today?

Two rows of alternating plates: some skeletons preserve the plates still staggered left and right, and no two plates from one animal match in size and shape, as true pairs would.

The Stegosaurus of which 1933 film still wore its plates in matching pairs, as in Charles Knight's 1901 painting?

King Kong: its stop-motion Stegosaurus is the first prehistoric beast the sailors meet on Skull Island, and they have to bring the charging animal down with gunfire.

Spike, a gentle Stegosaurus who hardly ever speaks, is one of the young heroes of which animated film?

The Land Before Time: Ducky watches him hatch, names him on the spot because he is a 'Spiketail', and her family later adopts him.

Skin impressions from its relative Hesperosaurus suggest Stegosaurus's plates were covered in what?

Keratinous sheaths: the impression of a plate's surface is smooth with long, shallow grooves in place of scales, the mark of a tough outer coat like the one on a cow's horn.

Stegosaurus's brain was long said to be the size of which nut?

A walnut: the old jibe sells the brain a little short, as armoured-dinosaur expert Kenneth Carpenter says it had the size and shape of a bent hot dog.

Marsh found a large cavity in Stegosaurus's hip vertebrae, which gave rise to what popular idea?

A 'second brain' in the hips: the cavity was bigger than the real brain, but birds have a similar space, and theirs holds a glycogen body whose exact job is still unclear.

What kind of armour guarded the throat of Stegosaurus?

A patch of tiny bony studs: the ossicles turned up with the first complete skeleton in the 1880s, and a second articulated find a century later confirmed that they armoured the throat.

What tipped the toes on a Stegosaurus's hind feet?

Blunt hooves: the bones at the tips of the hind toes are hoof-shaped, and they gave one species its name, Stegosaurus ungulatus, Latin for 'hoofed'.

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

Thagomizer: the word began as a caveman joke in a newspaper cartoon, and palaeontologists liked it so much that it now turns up in scientific papers and on museum labels.

Which cartoonist coined the name for Stegosaurus's tail spikes as a caveman joke in a 1982 strip?

Gary Larson: in his Far Side panel a caveman lecturer names the spikes after a late, unlucky colleague, and palaeontologist Ken Carpenter borrowed the joke for a 1993 conference talk.

How many spikes did a Stegosaurus carry on the end of its tail?

Four: Marsh gave one species eight after finding spare spikes mixed in with its bones, and old paintings copied him, but the extras may well have come from a second animal.

Fossils with the armour still in place show that Stegosaurus's tail spikes pointed which way?

Out to the sides: old pictures and models stood the spikes upright, but sideways spikes are the ones that strike point-first when the tail swings from side to side.

How did palaeontologist Robert Bakker suggest Stegosaurus reached leaves high above its head?

Rearing up on its hind legs: Bakker pictured it propped on its tail like a tripod to browse on tall plants, an idea other experts have disputed ever since.

A Stegosaurus tail spike fits neatly into a punctured tail bone of which dinosaur?

Allosaurus: the hole in its tail bone matches a spike so closely that it is prized as fossil proof that the tail was a working weapon and not just for show.

Why are Stegosaurus's plates usually found apart from the rest of the skeleton?

They were rooted in skin, not bone: with no joint to the backbone, the plates fell away as the body rotted, which is why their true arrangement puzzled scientists for decades.

How are Stegosaurus's jaws thought to have moved when it fed?

Only up and down: unlike duck-bills and horned dinosaurs it had no tight rows of grinding teeth, just small peg-like ones, so how it fuelled so large a body is still poorly understood.

Why could Stegosaurus probably never run fast?

Its back legs would outrun the front: they were so much longer that at speed their stride would have overtaken the front pair, a mismatch that also gave the animal its head-down, arched-back stance.

Fossil trackways have been read as evidence that Stegosaurus did what?

Travelled in multiple-age herds: footprints of small youngsters turn up alongside those of adults, a hint that the young stayed with a family group instead of fending for themselves.

A 2022 study of chemical traces in fossil bones concluded that Stegosaurus ran its body how?

Cold-blooded, like modern reptiles: the surprise was that its ancestors seem to have been warm-blooded, so plant-eaters like Stegosaurus had dialled their metabolism back down.

Which state made Stegosaurus its official state fossil in 1982?

Colorado: a class of fourth-graders campaigned across the state for two years before the governor signed the order.

Sophie, one of the most complete Stegosaurus skeletons ever found, is on display at which museum?

The Natural History Museum, London: she was Sarah while being dug up and prepared and became Sophie only when the museum bought her, though nobody knows whether the animal was female at all.

Signs of which disease in its bones suggest that Apex, the record-priced Stegosaurus, lived to old age?

Arthritis: bones at the base of the spine had fused together, and with no bite marks or battle wounds on the skeleton, the auction house's experts concluded that the animal simply died old.

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

$44,600,000: more than eleven times the low estimate, it beat the record of the T. rex Stan, and the buyer, hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin, promised that Apex would 'stay in America'.

Which auction house sold the Stegosaurus skeleton Apex in New York in 2024?

Sotheby's: the house says it worked with the skeleton's finder from the moment of discovery, documenting the excavation all the way to the saleroom.

Marsh at first pictured Stegosaurus walking how, a view he dropped once better skeletons arrived?

Upright on two legs: in Marsh's day most dinosaurs were assumed to be bipeds and the animal's odd proportions seemed to fit, but by 1891 its sheer bulk had changed his mind.

Stegosaurus met the public as a life-size model at the 1904 World's Fair in which city?

St. Louis: the giant, scaled up from a Charles Knight miniature, went on to the Smithsonian after the fair and later moved to the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, New York.

Stegosaurus's plates were not solid slabs of bone, so what ran all through them?

Blood vessels: that rich supply is why the plates were long pictured as radiators or solar panels, though later study of their inner structure suggested they were not built to shed heat.

German expeditions dug up Kentrosaurus, Stegosaurus's spikier cousin, around 1910 in what is now which country?

Tanzania: Kentrosaurus kept small plates on its neck and upper back but bristled with long spikes from the hips to the tail tip, one reason experts doubt that plates were mainly radiators.

A 2015 study argued that wide plates and tall plates in Stegosaurus's close relative marked which difference?

Males and females: both shapes came from full-grown animals buried together, which ruled out age and species, and the author argued that the plates were ornaments shaped by female choice.

A full-grown Stegosaurus was about as long as which of these?

A bus: big adults reached about nine metres, yet the head rode so near the ground that Stegosaurus probably fed on low-growing plants.

Most classic museum mounts of Stegosaurus, including the first, were built how?

As composites of several animals: complete skeletons are so rare that even Marsh's first drawing of the full skeleton filled the gaps in one species with the bones of another.

Arthur Lakes dug the bones that Marsh used to name Stegosaurus in 1877 near which foothill town?

Morrison: Lakes, a teacher and amateur painter, sent samples of the giant bones to both Marsh and his great rival, and Marsh hurried to put him on the payroll.

Marsh's collectors dug up Stegosaurus ungulatus in 1879 at which Wyoming fossil site?

Como Bluff: the bone-strewn ridge lay beside the Union Pacific tracks, and a tip-off from men working there sent Marsh's crews digging straight through the Wyoming winter.

What did Stegosaurus have at the front of its mouth in place of teeth?

A horny beak: the front of the jaws was toothless, so the beak did the cropping before the small teeth further back took over.

Stegron, a scientist turned half-Stegosaurus, is a comic-book foe of which superhero?

Spider-Man: Stegron was a lab assistant to Curt Connors, and copied the experiment that had turned his boss into the Lizard, using stolen dinosaur DNA instead.

Sophie the Stegosaurus was dug out of a Wyoming ranch in 2004 by crews from a museum in which country?

Switzerland: the Sauriermuseum at Aathal dug out and prepared the skeleton, found on a private ranch the year before, and private donors then helped another museum to buy it.