{"id":237042,"date":"2022-10-06T16:00:41","date_gmt":"2022-10-06T15:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.factstoryhub.com\/?p=237042"},"modified":"2022-10-05T15:56:50","modified_gmt":"2022-10-05T14:56:50","slug":"stegosaurus-facts","status":"publish","type":[],"link":"https:\/\/www.factstoryhub.com\/stegosaurus-facts\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Shocking Facts About The Stegosaurus"},"content":{"rendered":"
When you gaze upon a modern illustration of a stegosaurus, they can look rather frightful with their spiky tails and large, sharp plates adorning their backs.\n
Any five-year-old would happily tell you that these dinosaurs are nothing to worry about, though, as Stegosaurus were purely herbivorous.\n
Whether that’s now the extent of your knowledge on these fearsome-looking beasties or you know other facts here and there, it doesn’t matter \u2013 as we have some far more exciting facts about Stegosaurus just for you!\n
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Like many other dinosaurs, when the first stegosaurus fossils were discovered, we didn’t know how to put them together.\n
What made stegosaurus fossils particularly puzzling was that they had all these plate-like bones but no clues as to how or where they were attached.\n
The first paleontologists on the scene decided that they lay flat on the dinosaur’s back and, as such, named the new dinosaur “stegosaur,” meaning “roofed lizard.”\n
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American geologist Arthur Lakes discovered the first fossilized bones of a stegosaur in a quarry in Morrison, Colorado.\n Soon after, they were described as a new species by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1877.\n Within a short time, many other fossilized remains were realized from Stegosaurus, with several new subspecies being defined.\n Until 2007, all stegosaurs’ fossils were found in the US. In 2007, though, fossils believed to belong to the stegosaurus family were found in Portugal.\n At first, stegosaurus plates were believed to fit along their backs much like a turtle’s shell, but this theory was quickly debunked.\n Then, scientists thought they were used for defense, but with so few plates protecting their backs, this didn’t help much.\n Another theory supposed that the plates helped the dinosaur regulate its body temperature, but this wouldn’t have helped all that much with thermoregulation.\n The latest view is that they were purely ornamental and helped Stegosaurus attract mates.\n In 1982, cartoonist Gary Larson, the man behind the famed comic The Far Side, produced a comic strip where a bunch of cavemen is being taught the name of a stegosaurus’ tail.\n The comic describes the tail as a “thagomizer\u2026 after the late Thag Simmons”.\n Paleontologists obviously found this hilarious, as it’s been used officially by them ever since!\n Shortly after the Stegosaurus was first discovered, a plaster cast of its brain cavity was made, and it was quickly realized that they were far from being the brainiest dinosaurs.\n In fact, at the time, they had the smallest brains of any known dinosaur, weighing in at just 2.8 ounces (80 g). This was spectacularly small for a 5-ton (4.5 metric ton) dinosaur!\n While we have no idea what kind of processing power their tiny brains had, we can’t imagine they were able to think about anything particularly complex.\n These herbivorous beasts had to eat copious amounts of plant matter just to fuel themselves enough to walk around, so they couldn’t discriminate too much about which plants they ate.\n At some point, some clever stegosaurus figured out they could eat stones that would bounce around in their stomachs and help break their meals down even further and poop them out once finished.\n These stones, called gastroliths, were commonly used by many herbivorous dinosaurs and are even found in some modern creatures today, like chickens!\n While it would undoubtedly have been hilarious, it has since been thoroughly disproved.\n The thing is that stegosaurus’ were discovered very early in the paleontology game when many dubious claims were being made.\n It was none other than Othniel Charles Marsh, the man who first described the Stegosaurus, that claimed that they may have had brains in their butts due to the minuscule size of their brain cavity and a large cavity found in the posterior.\nThe spiky plates on their back weren’t for defense.\n
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Their tails have a specific name invented by a comic artist.\n
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Stegosaurus brains were no bigger than walnuts.\n
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They may have eaten rocks to help with their digestion.\n
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Scientists in the 1800s thought stegosaurus brains were in their butts.\n
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They’re the official Colorado State Fossil.\n
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