Stegosaurus Trivia
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49 free Stegosaurus trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Stegosaurus is the dinosaur with the kite-shaped plates and the spiked tail, and almost everything about it has been argued over. This quiz covers the plates first: why Marsh named it 'roof lizard', the four different arrangements proposed over the decades, whether the plates were for display or cooling, and how many an animal actually carried. Then the tail: the four spikes, the Allosaurus vertebra with a spike-shaped hole in it, and how a Far Side cartoon gave the weapon its scientific name. There are questions on the famously small brain and the 'second brain' myth, the Bone Wars discoveries at Morrison and Como Bluff, the 1885 Garden Park skeleton that finally showed what the animal looked like, Sophie in London, Apex's record-breaking $44.6 million auction, the fourth-graders who made it Colorado's state fossil, and its bite force compared with a Labrador. Easy questions ask what the plates were and which predator hunted it; hard ones want newtons, plate counts and quarry names. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Stegosaurus and the thagomizer, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Our Dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops quizzes go further.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the name Stegosaurus mean?
Roof lizard
Roof lizard: Marsh pictured the plates lying flat over the back like roof tiles, and only later finds showed that they stood on edge.
Q 02Stegosaurus lived during which period?
Late Jurassic
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.
Q 03Besides the western United States, Stegosaurus fossils have been found in which European country?
Portugal
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.
Q 04Grass had not yet evolved when Stegosaurus lived, so what did it most likely browse on?
Ferns and cycads
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.
Q 05Which group of dinosaurs are the closest relatives of Stegosaurus and its fellow stegosaurs?
Ankylosaurs
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.
Q 06Stegosaurus's tail spikes were for defence, but what are its plates now thought likeliest to have been for?
Display, with cooling secondary
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.
Q 07A dead explorer's sketch of a living Stegosaurus launches the expedition in which Arthur Conan Doyle novel?
The Lost World
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.
Q 08Marsh named Stegosaurus while locked in the Bone Wars, a fossil-hunting feud with which rival?
Edward Drinker Cope
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.
Q 09Marsh initially believed the first Stegosaurus remains came from what?
An aquatic turtle-like creature
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.
Q 10A high-school teacher and his students found the Stegosaurus skeleton long displayed at which city's natural history museum?
Denver
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.
Q 11Why is the Smithsonian's prize Stegosaurus skeleton nicknamed 'roadkill'?
Crushed flat as it fossilised
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.
Q 12What does stenops mean in the species name Stegosaurus stenops?
Narrow-faced
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.
Q 13The first mounted Stegosaurus skeleton went on display in 1910 at which museum?
Yale's Peabody Museum
Q 21What tipped the toes on a Stegosaurus's hind feet?
Blunt hooves
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'.
Q 22What is the name for the arrangement of spikes on a Stegosaurus tail?
Thagomizer
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.
Q 23Which cartoonist coined the name for Stegosaurus's tail spikes as a caveman joke in a 1982 strip?
Gary Larson
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.
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.
Q 14Which arrangement of Stegosaurus's back plates do most palaeontologists accept today?
Two rows of alternating plates
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.
Q 15The Stegosaurus of which 1933 film still wore its plates in matching pairs, as in Charles Knight's 1901 painting?
King Kong
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.
Q 16Spike, a gentle Stegosaurus who hardly ever speaks, is one of the young heroes of which animated film?
The Land Before Time
The Land Before Time: Ducky watches him hatch, names him on the spot because he is a 'Spiketail', and her family later adopts him.
Q 17Skin impressions from its relative Hesperosaurus suggest Stegosaurus's plates were covered in what?
Keratinous sheaths
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.
Q 18Stegosaurus's brain was long said to be the size of which nut?
A walnut
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.
Q 19Marsh found a large cavity in Stegosaurus's hip vertebrae, which gave rise to what popular idea?
A 'second brain' in the hips
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.
Q 20What kind of armour guarded the throat of Stegosaurus?
A patch of tiny bony studs
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.
Q 24How many spikes did a Stegosaurus carry on the end of its tail?
Four
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.
Q 25Fossils with the armour still in place show that Stegosaurus's tail spikes pointed which way?
Out to the sides
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.
Q 26How did palaeontologist Robert Bakker suggest Stegosaurus reached leaves high above its head?
Rearing up on its hind legs
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.
Q 27A Stegosaurus tail spike fits neatly into a punctured tail bone of which dinosaur?
Allosaurus
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.
Q 28Why are Stegosaurus's plates usually found apart from the rest of the skeleton?
They were rooted in skin, not bone
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.
Q 29How are Stegosaurus's jaws thought to have moved when it fed?
Only up and down
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.
Q 30Why could Stegosaurus probably never run fast?
Its back legs would outrun the front
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.