The Dinosaurs of Wyoming - Wyoming State Geological Survey ...

CHAPTER XV
The Armoured Dinosauria in Wyoming and
Elsewhere
Stegosaurian dinosaurs were first made known in 1877 by
Professor O. C. Marsh. Although numerous armored dinosaurs
are known, both in America and abroad, yet none is so
well known as the genus Stegosaurus, which is the best known
of them all. The osteology has been described by Marsh, Lull
and Gilmore. A species of the Stegosaurus (S. stenops
Marsh), is fully described by Gilmore from a nearly complete
specimen found at Garden Park, Colorado.
Armored dinosaurs, incompletely known, have been found
in marine deposits, showing that these animals lived near the
sea. I have told in the Preface about the discovery of Stegopelta
near Lander, in the black. Cretaceous (Hailey) shales
and Wieland has told of finding other armored dinosaur material
in the Niobrara (Cretaceous) chalk.
The armored dinosaurs of the Red Deer River, Canada,
Cretaceous, as collected for the American Museum of Natural
History by Barnum B.rown, are most wonderfully protected
of all known dinosaurs. One of them, called Paleoscincus,
is known (Figure 25) from practically perfect material. The
true skin of the animal was not preserved, but before disintegration
had set in an "impression cast" of it was formed in the
matrix, containing also the hundreds of small, bony nodules
which were embedded in the skin. In the skin were set at
intervals, in more or less regular arrangement, the larger flat
plates and spines. Paleoscincus was a huge armored reptile
with a broad, short body, massive legs, thick, heavy tail, and
a small, flat-topped, triangular skull. The teeth of this creature
are quite like those of other armored dinosaurs. Rings
of heavy bone surrounded the tail, like some fossil creatures
from South America.
European armored dinosaurs are not so well known as are
the American species, of which Stegosaurus ungulatus and
S. stenops are known from exceptionally perfect skeletons.
An interesting armor of one of the English dinosaurs consists
of a heavy bony shield over the hips, consisting of a mosaic
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