Kentrosaurus

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Kentrosaurus

Kentrosaurus (meaning "pointed lizard"; KEN-troe-SAW-rus, from the Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic Greece , Classical Greece , and Hellenistic civilization periods of ancient Greece and the classical antiquity....
kentron/?e?t???, meaning "point" or "prickle", and sauros/sa???? meaning 'lizard') is a genus

Genus

A genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the classification of living and fossil organisms. The taxonomic ranks are domain , kingdom , phylum, class , order , family , genus, and species....
of stegosaurid

Stegosauria

Known colloquially as stegosaurs, the Stegosauria are a group of Herbivore dinosaurs of the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous Period , being found mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, predominantly in what is now North America and China....
dinosaur

Dinosaur

Dinosaurs were the dominant vertebrate animals of Landform ecosystems for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic Period until the end of the Cretaceous Period , when most of them became extinct in the Cretaceous?Tertiary extinction event....
from the Late Jurassic

Late Jurassic

The Late Jurassic Epoch of the Jurassic Period is the unit of geologic time scale from 161.2 ? 4.0 to 145.5 ? 4.0 million years ago, which is preserved in Upper Jurassic stratum....
of Tanzania

Tanzania

Tanzania , officially the United Republic of Tanzania , is a country in East Africa that is bordered by Kenya and Uganda on the north, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the west, and Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique on the south....
, related to the better-known Stegosaurus
Stegosaurus

Stegosaurus is a genus of Stegosauria Thyreophora dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Period in what is now western North America. In 2006, a specimen of Stegosaurus was announced from Portugal, showing that they were present in Europe as well....
of North America

North America

North America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and almost totally in the western hemisphere....
.

This 4 meter long stegosaurian was described by Edwin Hennig in 1915. Like Stegosaurus, Kentrosaurus had a double row of plates running down its spine.

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Discovery and species

The 1909–1912 German expedition to East Africa

East Africa

East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN subregion, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:...
resulted in the discovery of several new dinosaur species, of which Kentrosaurus was one of the most important, for the reason outlined above — it implied a former proximity of Tanzania to the Morrison Formation

Morrison Formation

The Morrison Formation is a distinctive sequence of Late Jurassic sedimentary rock that is found in the western United States, which has been the most fertile source of dinosaur fossils in North America....
, in the eastern part of the Rocky Mountains

Rocky Mountains

The Rocky Mountains, often called the Rockies, are a mountain range in western North America. The Rocky Mountains stretch more than 4,800 kilometre from the northernmost part of British Columbia, in Canada, to New Mexico, in the United States....
. Of the three paleontologists on this expedition, it was Edwin Hennig who first described Kentrosaurus, in 1915. An almost-complete skeleton was at one time recovered and mounted in the Humboldt Museum

Humboldt Museum

The Museum f?r Naturkunde , widely known as the Naturkundemuseum, occasionally as the Humboldt Museum of Berlin. It has a massive collection of more than 25 million zoological, paleontological, and minerological specimens, including more than ten thousand type specimens....
, of the University of Berlin

Humboldt University of Berlin

The Humboldt University of Berlin is Berlin's oldest university, founded in 1810 as the University of Berlin by the liberal Prussian educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose university model has strongly influenced other European and Western universities....
but the museum was bombed during World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a Participants in World War II, including all of the great powers, organised into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers....
and many specimens were lost.

Paleobiology

Kentrosaurus was smaller than Stegosaurus. Kentrosaurus was just 4 metres (16 ft) long and weighed approximately 320 kg. It was certainly small for a stegosauria

Stegosauria

Armor

Kentrosaurus armor is also rather different from that of Stegosaurus. Kentrosaurus had small dorsal

Dorsum (biology)

In anatomy, the dorsum is the upper side of animals that typically run, fly, or swim in a horizontal position, and the back side of animals that walk upright....
plates along its neck and shoulders. Along the rest of the back and down the tail were several — typically six — spectacular pairs of imposing caudal spikes, each up to a foot in length (see also: Thagomizer

Thagomizer

The thagomizer, or tail spikes, is an arrangement of four to ten spikes on the tails of particular dinosaurs of the cladistics Stegosauria, of which Stegosaurus stenops is the most familiar....
). Like other stegosaurs, such as the European Lexovisaurus
Lexovisaurus

Lexovisaurus was one of the first dinosaurs from mid-to-Late Jurassic Europe, 165 mya to be discovered. It was a stegosaur. Its fossils have been found in France and northern England....
, it had another pair of spikes jutting backwards from the shoulders (often represented as jutting from the hips in older restorations). Unlike Stegosaurus, which may have used its large plates for thermoregulation

Thermoregulation

Thermoregulation is the ability of an organism to keep its core temperature within certain boundaries, even when the surrounding temperature is very different....
, the spines of Kentrosaurus were not well suited to such a function. They could have been used as display features, or armour for self-defence

Self-defense

Self-defense is the act of defending oneself, one's property or the well-being of another from physical harm. While the term may define any form of personal defense, it is strongly associated with civilian hand-to-hand defense techniques....
.

Kentrosaurus would have been preyed upon by theropods similar to Allosaurus
Allosaurus

Allosaurus is a genus of large theropod dinosaur that lived 155 to 145 million years ago, in the late Jurassic Period . The name Allosaurus means "different lizard" and is derived from the Ancient Greek a????/allos and sa????/sauros ....
and Ceratosaurus
Ceratosaurus

Ceratosaurus meaning 'horned lizard', in reference to the horn on its nose , was a large predatory dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Period , found in the Morrison Formation of North America, in Tanzania and Portugal....
. It could have used its tail to ward off attacks by lashing the tail from side to side. The spines along Kentrosaurus flanks would also have helped protect the animal from attacks.

Posture
Kentrosaurus also differed from Stegosaurus in one other key feature — it lacked the pronounced spines on the backbone, near the hip and tail region, that characterize the vertebra
Vertebra

A vertebra is an individual bone in the flexible column that defines vertebrate animals. The vertebral column encases and protects the spinal cord, which runs from the base of the cranium down the dorsal side of the animal until reaching the pelvis....
e of a Stegosaurus. The length of the thigh bone compared with the rest of the leg indicates that Kentrosaurus was a slow and inactive dinosaur. It may have reared up on its hind legs to reach twigs and leaves, but would normally have been fully quadruped
Quadruped

Quadrupedalism is a form of Terrestrial locomotion in animals using four limbs or leg . An animal or machine that usually moves in a quadrupedal manner is known as a quadruped, meaning "four feet" ....
al.

Environment
The similarities and differences between kentrosaurs and stegosaurs illustrate well the geological principle of continental drift
Continental drift

Continental drift is the movement of the Earth's continents relative to each other. The hypothesis that continents 'drift' was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596 and was fully developed by Alfred Wegener in 1912....
. The similarity between the kentrosaur fossils found in Tendaguru
Tendaguru

The Tendaguru beds are a fossil rich rock formation in Tanzania. It has been considered the richest of Late Jurassic stratum in Africa. Continental reconstructions show Tendaguru to have been in the southern hemisphere during the Late Jurassic....
, Tanzania
Tanzania

Tanzania , officially the United Republic of Tanzania , is a country in East Africa that is bordered by Kenya and Uganda on the north, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the west, and Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique on the south....
and the stegosaur fossils found in North America
North America

North America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and almost totally in the western hemisphere....
are evidence that these two points of the globe, now widely separated, were once very close together and indeed part of a supercontinent, known by geologists as Pangaea
Pangaea

Pangaea, Pang?a or Pangea was the supercontinent that existed during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras about 250 million years ago, before the component continents were separated into their current configuration....
and, later, the northern half, known as Laurasia
Laurasia

Laurasia was a supercontinent that most recently existed as a part of the split of the Pangaean supercontinent in the late Mesozoic era . It included most of the landmasses which make up today's continents of the northern hemisphere, chiefly Laurentia , Baltica, Siberia , Kazakhstania, and the North China Craton and East China Craton craton...
. These two points must also have had very similar climatic conditions
Climate

Climate encompasses the temperatures, humidity, atmospheric pressure, winds, rainfall, atmospheric particle count and numerous other Meteorology elements in a given region over long periods of time, as opposed to the term weather, which refers to current activity of these same elements....
, in order to have produced such similar specimens. Meanwhile, the differences between the animals illustrate the changes that their different ancestors underwent divergent evolution
Divergent evolution

Divergent evolution is the accumulation of differences between groups which can lead to the formation of new species, usually a result of diffusion of the same species adapting to different environments, leading to natural selection defining the success of specific mutations....
as the two groups of animals parted company, because of the subsequent separation of the tectonic plate
Tectonic Plate

#REDIRECT Plate tectonics...
s.

External links

at Dino Russ's Lair