Stegosaurus stenops

This Dinosaur Has God's Name All Over It!

No other dinosaur displays our Savior's handiwork quite like Stegosaurus.

Remains: Two complete skeletons and many partial and fragmentary skeletons. Both Adults and juveniles (Weishampel et al. 2007).

Size: 6.5 meters (21 feet) long and 3.5 tonnes in weight (Paul 2010).

Location: Lived in the lower Morrison Formation of the Preflood world. Skeletons are now found fossilized in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah (Weishampel et al. 2007).

Habitat: The Morrison was a semiarid habitat of mixed prairie and damp woodland riddled with rivers.

Ecology: Stegosaurus would have browsed on shrubs and small trees. When full grown, the only predators large enough to face it would have been large theropods like Ceratosaurus nasicornis and Allosaurus fragilis.

Taxonomy: Belongs to the Stegosauridae monobaramin with Tuojiangosaurus, Gigantspinosaurus, and Kentrosaurus. There is at least one other species of Stegosaurus, S. ungulatus. It defers from S. stenops in that it was slightly larger (7 meters and almost 4 tonnes) with narrower, more pointed back plates.

Stegosaurus was the epitome of large theropod disembowelment. Unlike most other dinosaurs, Stegosaurus had no stiffening fibers running the length of its tail. Such fibers would normally function in stiffening the tail to aid in balance but the heavy bodied stegosaur wouldn't have needed them. In addition to this unrestrained feature, the stegosaur had extra space between its caudal (tail) vertebrae allowing for ultimate flexibility (Bakker 1986). This feature alone would have made Stegosaurus the ultimate in self-defense, but the Creator thought better. To increase its range of motion, the stegosaur had special features on its forearms too. Each humerus had an immense deltoid crest for the attachment of the deltoid muscles. This growth on the bone almost seems disproportionate but looking at the muscle attachment regions on the scapula (shoulder bone) indicates a very large deltoid muscle, indeed (Bakker 1986). With extra power, the stegosaur could pivot on its front legs to swing its entire hindquarters into the blow, allowing the dinosaur to deliver a hit to a predator attacking near its head. Such a powerful blow would drive the four spines at the tails end so deep into a theropod's guts it would have killed it certainly.
Despite all these incredible features of self defense, the stegosaur's head was still vulnerable. To compensate, this dinosaur had a tight network of bony rounds under its chin to protect the throat. The back plates too ran up to the back of the head. Considering that the predators of the Morrison were nearly 2 tonnes in weight, the stegosaur's armory wasn't overkill.

Stegosaurus was well equipped with a horny beak
and battery of leaf-shredding teeth.

Of course, Stegosaurus didn't spend much time battling theropods (not many dared risk a confrontation). Its massive gut needed filling. Stegosaurus lived in a habitat crawling with giant sauropods. While their long necks were reaching into the tops of the evergreens, the underbrush was being cropped by smaller hypsilophodonts and dryosaurs. Stegosaurus, on the other hand, was perfectly designed for reaching the vegetation that grew in between. It had a perfect beak and battery of teeth for processing its food, this equipment was carried fairly low to the ground. To gain extra height, the stegosaur could rear an extra few feet into the trees. To do this, Stegosaurus had a system of muscles and ligaments running the length of its tall vertebral spines. It worked just like the cable of a crane, levering the stegosaur's beak up into the leaves (Bakker 1986).

Dorsal view of a Stegosaurus stenops skull.

Stegosaurus plate design and function is still debated. Based on some of the best specimens, it is a general consensus among paleontologists that the plates were arranged in two rows in an alternating fashion (Lessem et Glut 1993). The purpose of the plates, however, is far from settled. Some have postulated that they served as solar panels that exposed a network of blood vessels to the hot sun. Or perhaps those blood vessels served a function in communication, turning the plates bright red as the blood flooded the microgrooves in the bone. Not that Stegosaurus needed more weaponry, but even if the plates did serve one or both of the former functions they most likely worked at defense as well. The plates were not attached to bone and it's probably safe to presume that they didn't just flop around limply (an evolutionist partial to vestigial organs might think so). Rather, they almost certainly had attachments for skin muscles (Bakker 1986). These muscles, lying on the surface of the skeletal muscles, would have provided control of the direction of the plates. As an allosaur charged in at the stegosaur's side, it could orient its plates to face the foot-long jaws.
All said and done, Stegosaurus stenops was the ultimate in mega self-defense. It had incredible armory and perfect design for herbivorous feeding. In the predator/prey balance put in place after God's perfect curse on creation, stegosaurs were the perfect piece. When one thinks of design in creation, Stegosaurus doesn't often come to mind. I hope it does now.

This sketch illustrates Stegosaurus stenops lifting to pluck a choice bit of greenery from a limb.

References:

Bakker, Robert. 1986. The Dinosaur Heresies. William Morrow & Company, Inc. New York.

Lessem, Don and Donald F. Glut. 1993. The Dinosaur Society Dinosaur Encyclopedia. Random House, Inc. New York.

Paul, Gregory. 2010. The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs. Princeton University Press. Princeton, New Jersey.

Weishampel, David B., Peter Dodson, Halska Osmolska. 2007. The Dinosauria. University of California Press. Berkeley.