Ankylosaurus – Prehistoric Creatures #4

During the World War II, Hitler, in his journey to conquer the world used all kinds of weapon. From heavy machine guns to mighty aircrafts. However, one of his most fearful weapons was the Nazi Tank. Tanks were armored vehicles designed for front-line combat, mounted with machine barrel guns and equipped with powerful engines that made it possible to move nearly in any terrain. But how all these are related to our dinosaur, you will ask. Well the answer is simple, today I am gonna talk about an armored dinosaur that could easily be compared with an armored vehicle, like a tank. So let's begin.

Ankylosaurus lived in Western United States (New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana) and Canada, (Alberta) during the end of the Cretaceous Period about 67 million years ago. It was a herbivorous animal and it's diet was consisted of ferns and other ground-hugging vegetation. It's fossil was first discovered in 1906, in the Hell Creek Formation (Montana) by Peter Caisen, a collector, in an exhibition of American's Museum of Natural History led by the scientist Barnum Brown. This dinosaur's genus name is derived from the Greek words άγκυλος/ankylos (bent or curved) and σαύρα/saura (lizard). So Ankylosaurus is usually also called fused, stiff or curved lizard.

Adult animals were massive-bodied and probably weighed about 6 tones. Their skull was about 2.5 feet / 76 cm in length. The largest specimen that was ever found, was 20 feet / 6 meters long and 5.5 feet / 1.6 meters tall. Aside from it’s extremely bulky body, Ankylosaurus was heavily armored too. Protective horns, spikes and plates covered it’s head, shoulders and generally it’s whole body, even it’s eyelids were armored. Only the bottom side, it’s belly, was free from all those protective features. For sure this animal was a tough nut to crack, especially for it’s predators. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that this creature could easily be called “prehistoric tank” instead of “Ankylosaurus”. It is also worth mentioning, that our dinosaur in order to carry all this weight, had short, burly legs therefore it was extremely slow. In the video below we can see an Ankylosaurus robot and how it’s movements may looked like.

Furthermore, it seems that the tail club of Ankylosaurus was used as a defensive weapon against predators as it could whip at very high speed. When attacked, Ankylosaurus would probably have stood his ground, protected by it’s natural armor. If the predator was in range, the tail would swung sideways and hit it’s target, as a result the attacking dinosaur would have been critically wounded. Scientists also believe that the larger the tail club was the better were the possibilities for the male Ankylosaurus to mate with more females. Below we can see a representation of a battle scene between Ankylosaurus and Tyrannosaurus.

Here, we can see one more scene from the Jurrassic World (2015) film, in which we have another battle between a herd of Ankylosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus.

Last but not least, I present you a video from my favourite youtuber, Matthew the Dinosaur King who created a video in which he presents an Ankylosaurus toy figure, he is really the best!!!