At the end of the Jurassic, about 150 million years ago, stegosaurs were not exactly unnoticed . Although these dinosaurs were not too large compared to some of their cousins – adults were around four meters tall and could reach nine in length – they had distinctive bony plates and spines that ran down their back and finished off their tail , respectively.
Different studies maintain that these herbivores, which fed mainly on fruits , moss and ferns, could use these dorsal sheets to protect themselves, regulate their body temperature and even as a kind of warning system, since, apparently, they could acquire an intense coloration if the animal felt threatened.
However, the spikes on its tail have not received as much attention and, in general, it has been taken for granted that they were used as a defense. Now, a team of paleontologists points out that they could also be deadly weapons. This is demonstrated by the trace of a fatal wound that one of these pieces left in the pubic bone of an allosaurus, a large predator similar in size to the stegosaurus that went wrong in a confrontation with one of them. What’s more, experts have concluded that to inflict such damage, the stegosaurus had to have very precise handling of the limb .
Robert Bakker, a well-known paleontologist from the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences, who participated in the study – it was presented at the last meeting of the Geological Society of America, in Vancouver – points out that “the wound caused a tremendous infection that was it spread very quickly through the intestines and reproductive organs of the allosaurus ”. The bone tissue of this theropod shows no signs of healing, so it must have died shortly after the shock. “The stegosaurs did not have a large brain, but they had strong muscles along the tail , which was very flexible and could control up to the tip,” Bakker notes.
Photo: Robert Bakker
