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Does a Stegosaurus have plates?
A few basic things about Stegosaurus are known to just about everyone with a modicum of general knowledge: it’s large (7 m long or so), has a series of large plates arranged along its neck, back and tail, and has a cluster of spikes at the tip of its tail.
Why did Stegosaurus have plates on its back?
The plates were a temperature-regulation device. If Stegosaurus was, in fact, cold-blooded (as most plant-eating dinosaurs of the Mesozoic Era presumably were), it might have used its plates to soak up light from the sun during the day and dissipate extra body heat at night.
How many teeth did the Stegosaurus have?
Stegosaurus was a herbivorous dinosaur with around 78 small, triangular and flat teeth that it use to consume a likely diet of plants such as mosses, ferns, horsetails, cycads, and conifers or fruits.
What are a Stegosaurus plates called?
scutes
Its 17 plates, called scutes, were made of a bony material called osteoderms but were not solid; they had lattice-like structures and blood vessels throughout.
How are the plates of a Stegosaurus different?
However, new discoveries and reexamination of existing Stegosaurus specimens since the 1970s suggest that the plates alternated along the backbone, as no two plates from the same animal have exactly the same shape or size.
What kind of armour did a Stegosaurus have?
Stegosaurs lost the armour from the flanks of the body that these early relatives had. Plating among different stegosaurs varied: some forms apparently had parallel rather than alternating plates, and some, such as Kentrurosaurus, had plates along the front half of the back and spikes along the back half and tail.
How big was the Stegosaurus in the Jurassic period?
Stegosaurus, (genus Stegosaurus ), one of the various plated dinosaurs ( Stegosauria) of the Late Jurassic Period (159 million to 144 million years ago) recognizable by its spiked tail and series of large triangular bony plates along the back. Stegosaurus usually grew to a length of about 6.5 metres (21 feet),…
Where was the Stegosaurus found in North America?
dinosaur: Stegosauria. The most familiar genus is Stegosaurus, found in the Morrison Formation (Late Jurassic) of western North America. Stegosaurus was 3.7 metres (12 feet) in height and 9 metres in length, probably weighed two tons, and had a broad, deep body.