Posted on 10/30/2009 7:19:16 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
A husband and wife team of paleontologists has discovered a newfound species of armored dinosaur that lived 112 million years ago in what is now Montana.
The duo, Bill and Kris Parsons of the Buffalo Museum of Science in New York, spotted the dinosaur's skull on the surface of a hillside in Montana in 1997. Over the next few years, they retrieved more of the now nearly complete skull along with skin plates, rib fragments, a vertebra and a possible limb bone from the dinosaur species.
Now called Tatankacephalus cooneyorum, the beast is a type of ankylosaur, or a group of plant-eating dinosaurs that resembled nature's armored tanks as they walked about on four limbs and their bodies were covered with bony armor that may have been covered with a colorful keratinous sheathing (same as the stuff in bird beaks and turtle shells).
"These were big dinosaur versions of a Sherman tank," Bill Parsons said. "They were armored and they withstood whatever came at them, and they just kept going." T. cooneyorum was about 15 to 20 feet (4.5 to 6 meters) in length.
And this dinosaur had its share of protection, with two sets of stubby horns, one on the cheeks and the other around its eyes, two thick domes at the back of the skull and thickened areas around the nasal region.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Better?
I think I’ll take door # 18, reptile or not.
A gopher with a Halloween mask!!
Not much on the topic here.
How come we never see Mammals with armor plating of any kind...excepting horns....?
Archeology speaking....
Not sure what a Rino carries...
Show me the fossilized skeleton!
I read a National Geographic article on dinosaurs. WONDERFUL pictures and vignettes of how they lived.
Then they showed the 1X2 inch bone fragment from which they extrapolated all of that. Color? Size? What they ate? How they cared for their young? What their defenses were? From a 1X2 inch fossilized bone fragment.
These articles are interesting but have lost any magic, they pretty much fall into the realm of fantasy.
Hey, if the fossil of an armored humanoid were found in a prehuman paleontological strata, nothing would be published. ;’D
The width and height of the assembly lines had much more to do with it. :’)
If evolution worked for reptiles ....why didn't it work for humanoids...?
Hoosez it did? :’)
LOL!
A little history’s in order. The M-4 “Sherman” was built to be a speedy, armored escort for infantry. The German tanks were bulit to be mobile artillery. Shermans were less armored and smaller gunned but faster and more mobile. A big mistake was first making them with gasoline engines, vs. diesel, which resulted in their exploding when hit. They could not slug it out with bigger, heavier German tanks which also had 90 or 105 millimeter guns to the Sherman’s 75. The allies used Shermans in packs to destroy each heavy German tank. Shermans operated in fours. One or two Shermans were destroyed for each Panzer but the allies had the numbers.
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