Dinosaur Armor and Weaponry Was Even More Impressive Than Researchers Thought– www.scientificamerican.com

Dinosaur Armor and Weaponry Was Even More Impressive Than Researchers Thought– www.scientificamerican.com
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Excerpt:

In the pantheon of dinosaur royalty, sauropods may have been the biggest and tyrannosaurs the deadliest. But the ceratopsians, ankylosaurs and stegosaurs were the most metal dinosaurs of all. With their horns and spikes, body plates and tail clubs, these horned and armored dinosaurs have long captured popular imagination. In the early 1900s American paleoartist Charles R. Knight depicted one of these weapon wielders, the plant-eating Triceratops, as a worthy adversary of carnivorous Tyrannosaurus rex; Stegosaurus makes regular (and formidable) appearances in the Jurassic Park movie franchise that began in 1993. Yet despite our enduring fascination with these “living tanks,” as armor-bearing dinosaurs have been described, many details of their anatomy—including the composition and even the functions of their impressive accoutrements—have remained unknown.

The problem stemmed from the scarcity of fossils of these animals that, even when found, often consisted of mere scraps. These recovered specimens also preserved only the hard bony parts, not any of the associated soft tissue. In their efforts to reconstruct armored dinosaurs as they were in life based on this meager evidence, paleontologists took what they thought was a conservative approach and assumed that the bony remnants of the armor of these long-dead dinosaurs constituted the bulk of the armor in life. Those reconstructions revealed some magnificent creatures—ceratopsians equipped with three-foot-wide frills, stegosaurs brandishing 30-inch-long tail spikes, nodosaurs bristling with shoulder spikes nearly a foot and a half in length.