Spiky Dinosaur (Little Lift and Look): 1

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Though Ankylosaurus is among the most famous dinosaurs, it is also one of the most puzzling. Unlike its nodosaur relatives, scientists have only unearthed a handful of Ankylosaurus fossil fragments, and with each new discovery, our understanding of the species grows. Paleontologists have rearranged the available fossils time and again, with the most recent proposed body shape suggesting it may have been longer and thinner than previously thought, and equipped with a denser coat of spikes. A member of the Ankylosauridae family, the ankylosaurus is the largest member of its family. This species lived in North America during the Cretaceous period. Spikes covered their body to protect them from predators. These dinosaurs stood around 5.6 feet tall (1.7 meters), and had a lengthy body of around 24 feet (7.3 meters). Ankylosaurus are herbivores, eating a variety of low-lying plants.

Dinosaurs ( episode list) • Videography • Creating Dinosaurs: The Sketches That Started It All • Dinosaurs (comic book) • Big Songs • I'm the Baby (Gotta Love Me) • Dinosaurs Live!The fossil skeleton, unveiled in December in the journal Nature, belongs to a newfound type of small armored dinosaur called Stegouros elengassen. The creature is named for its bizarrely shingled “roof tail” and an armored beast in the mythology of the Patagonian Aónik’enk people. Its novel tail weaponry is now named the macuahuitl, after a bladed club wielded by the Aztec. Spiny has a habit of often only being able to defeat gentle or timid wild dinosaurs who don't have Move Cards ( Styracosaurus, Saurolophus, Deltadromeus), though he has also defeated strong dinosaurs with Moves ( Euoplocephalus, Anchiceratops, Jobaria).

One of my favorite dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History is the Styracosaurus . The insanely ornamented creature is presented as if swimming through a wave of plaster, a pose meant to depict the way the dinosaur was found in the field. It is a beautiful mount, but the restored and reconstructed skeleton obscures the fact that the actual specimen is not so complete. One feature of tyrannosaurus is its huge skull. The skull would have been able to support large jaw muscles, giving tyrannosaurus a powerful bite. The sister group to the more famous stegosaurs, they had rows of bony plates embedded into their skin, some of which would form huge flat plates while others grew outwards as spikes. Some species had a large bony club on the end of their tails. When paleontologist Peter Dodson published his then-comprehensive book The Horned Dinosaurs in 1996, experts recognized about 23 different horned dinosaurs. Now the count has more than tripled, ranging from lanky little creatures known only from bits of jaw like Gryphoceratops to hulking, spiky herbivores such as Kosmoceratops (hailed as the “horniest dinosaur ever” when discovered). The rate of discovery is blistering, and, in fact, just this week paleontologists announced two new horned dinosaurs simultaneously.If you can imagine a cross between a small dinosaur and a bird, then you’ll probably have a good idea of what Archaeopteryx looked like. It had the tooth-filled mouth and bony tail of a dinosaur, with the feathered wings of a bird. It may even have been able to fly, rather than simply glide. In all known species of ankylosaurs, this armour would have been embedded in their skin, meaning that this new fossil in which the armour is physically fused to the bones is unlike anything seen before. Tlatolophus probably stretched about 26 feet from snout to tail and stood about 6.5 feet tall at the hip. Based on its well-preserved skull, scientists think that the animal was a close cousin of the iconic crested lambeosaur Parasaurolophus, which are seen drinking from a lake near the beginning of the movie Jurassic Park. Everyone knows Triceratops. Old “three-horned face” has stood as the ultimate in spiky dinosaurs since it was named in 1889. Yet Triceratops was only the last in a long line of horned dinosaurs. Horned dinosaurs thrived on prehistoric Asia and North America for over 100 million years, and it’s only now that paleontologists are uncovering a wealth of ceratopsians that are weirder and more varied than anyone ever expected. Designed to be an “online dinosaur museum”, it’s a great place to start if you want to find out more about a particular dinosaur.