Papo Dinosaurs Ankylosaurus 55015

The type species of the genus, also the only species, Ankylosaurus magniventris, was discovered in 1906 and was given its name in 1908, meaning "bending saurian with the big belly". Subsequently, a small number of fossils of the species have been found. They are all incomplete so that only part of the skeleton is known. By looking at other Ankylosauridae, the group to which Ankylosaurus belongs, we can form a picture of what the animal looked like. Ankylosaurus was well over six feet long, perhaps as long as eight feet. Older books give a length of up to eleven meters, but those estimates turned out to be much too high. He had a very flat and round torso with very wide hips and short legs. The neck was short and carried a short broad head with strikingly curved jaws in which there were small teeth and which ended in a large curved beak. With that beak and teeth, Ankylosaurus ripped off pieces of plant that it swallowed almost whole and digested further in its large belly. The head, trunk, and tail of Ankylosaurus were covered on top by smaller and larger flat bony plates. They protected it from the bites of the main predator in its environment, the giant Tyrannosaurus rex. Ankylosaurus could also defend itself well against this with a heavy bone club at the end of its tail with which it could deal deadly blows.